Hlynur Helgason

Spiraling through Guilford County communities

The UNCG Art Truck and Greensboro Project Space are happy to welcome Icelandic artist Hlynur Helgason to guilford county for his photographic project. The Medicine Show- Spiraling through Guilford County communities is a photographic journey through Guilford County over seven sites and seven days. The Photographic locations have been selected based on the Fibonacci Spiral, a mathematical construction that has been integral to art historical thinking on perspective since the renaissance. For The Medicine Show Hlynur places the spiral on an early map of Gulford county, spiraling from Highpoing Station inwards towards a center at Greensboro Project Space on February One Place in downtown Greensboro.

For the duration of the project the Art Truck was converted into a mobile alternative photolab and studio, documenting Guilford County communities. The aim of the project was to document the county as a conglomerate of distinct historically manufactured places, focusing on the typical rather than the spectacular, thus attempting a timeless truth. The project relates back through history, emulating the neneteenth century spectacle of the medicine show, where a quack medicine salesman would come to town, often with jazz musicians and dancers, to create a local spectacle in the town square. It is in this context that the project uses the pictorialist cyanotype process, which was popular in the late nineteenth century, creating magical images by exposing synthesized paper to sunlight. The title of the show, The Medicine Show, is also a responseto the situation worldwide in the last two years, in times when disease, its prevention and healing, has overtaken almost everything else.

The places we set up shop have been chosen as focal points on the spiral. The choice of locations is therefore predetermined and to a large extent arbitrary, creating the possibility of chance encounters along the way. The Art Truck set up shop each day at the prescribed location inviting the local community to partake in decisions relating to the photoshoot and follow the process of creating and developing the images. Every evening the resulting works were carried with the truck and installed in the exhibition at Greensboro Project Space. Another aspect of the project includes the active involvement of local photographers, students from Professor Leah Sobsey´s Capstone Photography class at UNC Greensboro, who were invited to participate producing their own representations of the seven locations. These works were installed alongside Hlynur Helgasons cyanotypes in the gallery.

This work draws on Hlynur´s practice of photographing locations from multiple perspectives creating simultaneously intimate and distanced experiences of place that challenge our sense of photography representing reality while also linking photography to a human scale. An example of such a project is Boxhagener Platz, executed in Berlin in 2018.