Northern Drifting

Julia Baier

Julia Baier presents a new sequential work from 2015 in which she responds to the extremes of the Icelandic landscape: black volcanic rock contrasting with white snow, moss with jagged crags, hot water with cool air. She creates a photographic correspondence to these extremes in black-and-white images generated through experimenting with the panorama function of her iPhone camera. She shoots photos from a moving car, mobilizing not her own motion, but that of the automobile to attain highly original results. The camera invents, it copies things randomly, it compresses time, omits and drifts – all in relation to the car’s speed. The unusual, mysterious images possess both painterly and cinematic qualities, corresponding to the mythical quality of the mysterious island and alluding to the vulnerability of nature in our present era.