Hyperborea, 09, 2006

Since his first visit to Iceland in 2000, the British photographer Dan Holdsworth has been repeatedly drawn back to phantasmagorical landscape. In the enormous Untitled 8 (Hyperborea) – shot on location in Iceland, and named for a mythical northern realm that the Ancient Greeks believed to be perpetually sunlit and peopled by giants – Holdsworth turns the island into something mythical and mysterious. Craggy, snow-capped mountains sit in darkness beneath the wondrous spectacle of the aurora borealis, here embodied in cosmic plumes of green and yellow during a meteor shower. The overall composition has both the strangeness of science fiction and the Romantic sublimity of the nineteenth-century apocalyptic painter John Martin. Using his characteristic prolonged exposure to freeze an extended period of time in a single shot, Holdsworth manipulates the real to create an impossible view, beyond usual human capabilities. ‘My interest,’ says Holdsworth, ‘is centrally dealing with perception, and obviously photography is key to this cybernetic extension of our visual perceptions. I think in my work I’ve felt that we really need to deal with how we mediate the world through these cybernetic extensions through our photographic eyes.’ Exhibited internationally in group and solo shows, Holdsworth’s works are held by such major institutions as the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Mumok.
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