SMoCA invited four Scandinavian artists to Scottsdale to make work in response to Arizona’s physical environs and social landscape. Hot, sunny, dry, new and suburban, the metro-Phoenix area could not be more different from the cold, sea-faring Nordic region, with its historic cities and rural towns. These artists’ prior experience of the southwest was primarily through films, historic paintings and legendary photographs.

For Swedish artist Matts Leiderstam, landscapes are redolent with meaning and pose important questions about history and memory. He considers how we view and interpret landscape through art, using photography and video as his medium.

Icelandic artist Ragna Róbertsdóttir creates site-specific “paintings” using captivating materials such as the lava rock found in Iceland, a volcanic island with frequent geological activity. She is transforming the front windows of the Museum with an overlay of fine crushed glass, playing with the strong Arizona light and the fragile yet dangerous nature of the material. Her work also refers to the meditative play of light in James Carpenter’s scrim wall and James Turrell’s Knight Rise, both nearby in the Museum’s Nancy and Art Schwalm Courtyard.

Norwegian artist Torgeir Husevaag’s Freeze Out continues his on-going exploration of the game of poker. He assigned each of the local volunteer, amateur performers a personality type based on Dr. Alan N. Schoonmakers “stylus grid of poker,” which charts the relationship between a person’s character and playing style, then recorded the resultant poker game on video. The resulting drawings and sculpture resemble quasi-scientific studies of the elusive human mind.

Egill Sæbjörnsson of Iceland explores the private and strangely surreal world of dreams. The exhibition includes work, created during his residency in Scottsdale, made of materials scavenged around town. Sæbjörnsson projects his ideas of the area onto the landscape. Yet these projections are not some type of fantastical dream but rather fashioned by the filters for the real world that we carry with us.