Through September 13, 202
“With rolling black sand beaches, mist-wreathed mountainscapes, cerulean glacier tongues and bubbling hot springs, Mother Nature has candidly outdone herself decorating this small Atlantic island.” Thus an English writer described the wild beauty of Iceland, “a cornucopia of natural splendor” so different from green and pleasant England, in florid romantic terms well suited to modern tourist travel guides. To be sure, Iceland attracts pilgrims of all sorts, including fine-art photographers, who go in search of unspoiled scenery and leave behind some of the unfortunate by-products of commercial development.
It’s not just the trash they carelessly abandon, but also their unexamined commercial consumption mentality relegating the experience of wildness to a collectiable lifestyle trophy: See it now before others spoil it! While Iceland has its preservationists, the small population of islanders is by no means deep Green when it comes to ecological matters, ranking among the bigger per-capita spenders in global capitalism. In his 1948 novel, “The Atomic Station,” novelist Halldor Laxness presciently dramatized the perils of Cold War modernization, having his young heroine, Ugla, her character purportedly based on an early environmentalist, expostulating on the objectification and commercialization of the sacred wilderness:
“Who thought up the theory that Nature is a matter of sight alone? … Nature is in front of us, and behind us; Nature is under and over us, yes and in us, but most particularly it exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same, and never in a rectangular frame.”
“As Above So Below” brings together American Barbara Boissevain and Icelander Charlotta Hauksdóttir, two eminent Bay Area photographers who are undoubtedly ethically, if not aesthetically, in sync with Ugla (despite her dismissive opinion of rectangular art). The phrase (in Latin) from which the exhibition title is derived, ut supra, ut infra, is used these days in legal documents to cite quotations elsewhere in the text, but it derives from earlier, pagan sources in medieval alchemical and mystical lore asserting that the earthly and heavenly worlds are united through sympathetic magic. As it is in heaven, so it is on earth; the universal mirrors the personal; the external world reflects the internal world; the cosmos is reflected in the individual; and the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm. The title could be also said to refer to the imagery and construction of the works: more on the double/Doppelganger aspect, ut infra.
In 2015, Boissevain photographed Iceland’s stunning mountains, glaciers and icebergs, and years later returned to her images in her “Endangered Ice” series (2024), mindful of the growing effects of global warming, and interested in moving beyond (While not excluding) visual beauty in her conceptual, subtly sociopolitical approach. Boissevain’s six new mixed-media pieces combine her earlier digital prints with the techniques of watercolor and monoprint revived from her graduate school painting years.
The five photo hybrids from the “Endangered Ice” series in the show depict blue icebergs shown in elevation, removed from the landscape, and mounted on unpainted backgrounds like biological specimens. Their large submerged masses taper into triangular roots, like jellyfish, mushrooms, thunderclouds dripping precipitation, or extracted teeth. The suggestive ambiguity of the forms contrasts well with the visual power of Boissevain’s rhythmic brushwork, creating heavy sculptural-looking masses that hover mysteriously, mid-air. The fifth piece, “Endangered Ice Shadow Installation” (2025), contains similar iceberg-clouds, but here, the painted clouds are mounted on Plexiglas that has been cut to fit the irregular shapes, and mounted on transparent dowels a few inches out from the wall so that they cast shadows, suggesting islands or continents, seen from above, floating in a crystal clear sea.
Hauksdóttir takes a different direction in her four 2D “photography collage” works. These depict rugged mountainscapes in a traditional pictorial slice-of-life manner, but subvert (or enrich) that style (which Laxness’s Ugla probably would have disliked), as executed by postcard-scenic painters, and by scissors-cut excavations, seams or sinkholes into the earth. Through these apertures in “Erosion XII” and “Erosion XIV” (both 2024) we perceive a surprising subterranean layer of text aligned with the surface geomorphology — an underworld of words describing the past and future of the geology that “exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same,” though presented here within the dreaded rectangular frame.
In “Resurgence IV” and “Resurgence XIV” (both 2024) Hauksdóttir imagines the land recovering, with new plant life emerging below the surface, even reaching beyond the current topography and up into the sky. A trio of “Reclamation” sculptures made between 2023 and 2025 and “Into Deep” (2025) — in too deep? — show the artist taking a more conceptual approach, fabricating geometric shapes from branches on which her rolled photos are sewn together, simulating indigenous artifacts of some historically anachronistic vanished tribe that used photography to commemorate, protect, and regenerate the natural world.
If culture has too often given nature short shrift, following the reductive rationalism of toxic capitalism (and slash-and-burn human nature), there is no need to keep on fatally fouling our nests. No one is coming to rescue us; we’re not off to some Martian billionaire bunker utopia to hatch a new race of moral derelicts. Art is not politics, but it can be part of the solution, one small epiphany after another.
