Working with oversized sheets of mylar hand-painted with acrylic and ink, Jóelsdóttir transforms the Clocktower’s Performance Gallery into a site where ideas, experience, and history billow and break across the space’s pillars, ceiling, and floor. At first delicate and ethereal, Jóelsdóttir’s sculptural canvases reveal a world in which connections and fissures occur with the paradoxical logic of intuition. Drawing from personal experience, art history, and interpretations of current events, surge’s construction and content reflect the everyday, unconscious practice of creating personal narratives from memory, and the inevitable interpretations and misinterpretations of human interaction.

Born in Iceland, Jóelsdóttir moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago where she received her Masters of Fine Art.. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums in both the United States and Iceland including the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Stux Gallery in New York.

The Clocktower Gallery is located in a City-owned building at 108 Leonard Street between Broadway and Lafayette, so please, remember to bring you ID for security. Enter through the grey door under the scaffolding and take the elevator to the 12th Floor. Take a left, enter through the red staircase B door, and walk up to the 13th Floor. The AIR offices and studios are down the corridor.

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