Elin Jakobsdottir

This exhibition has been at Stills gallery, Edinburgh since November and finishes this weekend.
On my recent visits to Stills I have been captivated by the black and white film photographs in the main gallery, but today I made time to look more carefully.

The series of 24 photographs are "snapshots" of public places. I am particularly interested in this, see my work on the Parc de la Villette. Jakobsdottir uses the Tschumi method of a filmstrip to show her vignettes of life and place in everyday situations. Some of the photos show two people in silhouette facing different ways in Janus mode. Janus was the Roman god of thresholds and endings.

The catalogue claims that the photos are making the "familiar strange" in Surrealist mode. I am also intrigued very much by this concept, but I am not sure how it relates to the Janus idea For me the photographs work best as a whole piece glimpsed in passing, rather as they were indeed in motion. This way they do evoke a sense of place and loss and gain. They do remind me of the Manhattan Transcripts, with its random everyday movements and events in Central Park, for example.

More interesting for me in this exhibition was Jakobsdottir's fascination with making and process. She shows a video of two joiners constructing a peculiar sitting-up coffin-like "horse-box". This is in the exhibition and is beautifully and solidly made. The joiners not only carefully make the box but sit and lie in it, and then carry it down a street in Berlin. I liked the respect for the working people and their change into participants in the art project.

Another video showed a young boy drawing a plan of a house. This was absolutely engrossing. His tentative movements as he decided on the details of the plan, his physical and imaginative involvement in the process and his palpable sense of achievement was mesmerising to watch. An older man, possibly his grandfather, also drew a house plan. He was more skilled and could draw good straight lines without a ruler! His house was much simpler and less fun, though.

There was lots to think about from this exhibition, particularly the link I experienced to Tschumi, the interest in private and public moments and how they interweave, and also the emphasis on skill and the mind and body.