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Eyrún Úa Þorbjörnsdóttir BA project in visual arts Report and essay BA project in visual arts - report and essay Supervisor: Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir Iceland University of the Arts Department of Fine Arts Spring semester 2025 Blue hour / Heiðblámi Eyrún Úa Þorbjörnsdóttir BA project in visual arts - thesis BA project supervisors: Ólöf Nordal, Páll Haukur Björnsson and Sirra Sigrún Sigurðardóttir Thesis supervisor: Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir Iceland University of the Arts Department of Fine Arts Spring semester 2025 This report briefly discusses a 16-credit final project for a BA degree in visual arts at the Iceland University of the Arts. It is prohibited to copy the report in any way without the author's permission. 1 It takes nothing more than an evening for us to see existence in a different light. The sun sets and for a brief moment bathes everything in golden light, delights and shines horizontally into the eyes, illuminates teeth framed by a smile. The light changes occur in stages, each accompanied by specific colors, before darkness on one hand settles in or dawn appears on the other. After the gold comes the blue, and tension gives way to deep calm. The dark blue sky slows down thoughts, knows how this works, knows that now souls will begin to regret and yearn. It knows you, but it also knows another world. It dims the colors, light green falls silent, yellow closes its eyes, pink falls asleep. The blue soothes you, lures out images. It slows down the sequence of events and sets new ones in motion. The clear blue is the bridge into dreams. Blue hour is a term used for that part of the twilight when the sun has sunk deep below the horizon but has not yet fully set. This period usually lasts a very short time, and in that moment the sky takes on a dark blue color, before darkness sets in. These are the boundaries between day and night, and between wakefulness and sleep. Life slows down, and stories are put on pause, while dreams pick up the thread. The term blue hour has also acquired a meaning in poetry, referring to melancholy, loneliness, and emotional intensity, as the color blue is often associated with sorrow and similar emotional states. How would you frame a dream? Do you know where the outlines of a single moment lie, or do you feel that memories freeze the story at some point? Is it when your lips merge with others, is it the moment you receive your child in your arms, is it when you look back and know you will not escape danger? Dreams are memories where the highlights of events are more fixed than other parts of the story. In the video work Blue hour(Icelandic: Heiðblámi), three scenes stand side by side and show three extended moments originating from dreams. A great stillness rests over them, so that at times one might think they were photographs, but time passes through them, and in between, something happens in all of them. The videos are projected directly onto a white wall and are framed in a rather neutral low relief, the same color as the wall, reminiscent of a headboard. 2 Eyrún Úa. Blue hour. Overview image. 2025. Eyrún Úa. Blue hour. Close-up. 2025. 3 Dreams belong to a parallel reality that is generally hidden from us, and the memories from there are not necessarily of such a nature that we can access them at any time. To emphasize this distance, the projection of the videos is somewhat dim, as if there is a veil between us and them that separates our waking state from the dream state. The scene on the far left shows a rough stone wall with a hole that was once a window. Through it, a landscape can be seen in the distance: a mountain, the sea, and a grassy slope. The sky is red, and judging by the colors of the clouds, the sun is setting. Around the middle of the video, a person enters the scene and fills the hole from the inside with a duvet. In the second part of the video, the duvet prevents the landscape from being seen. Eyrún Úa. Blue hour. Still from a video work. 2025. In the video in the middle, there are three girls dressed in pink and nothing but green grass in the background. They turn their backs to each other but examine themselves and each other in mirrors they are holding. When they make eye contact through the mirrors, they exchange mirrors, and so this video goes on until the end, or for seventeen minutes. 4 milli. Eyrún Úa. Blue hour. Still from a video work. 2025. The scene furthest to the right shows a French window on a dark blue house. The window is viewed from outside into the house, three rooms deep, and at the far back, the back of a woman sitting on a chair is visible. Another person appears in the house and seems to be climbing down from something high, perhaps a bunk bed. She is dressed in outdoor clothing and walks toward the woman; they exchange words that cannot be heard, and the person walks out through another door. A little later, she is seen climbing up a ladder and in through the window from outside, closing it behind her, and climbing back up to where she first came from. This action repeats throughout the video, but with long pauses in between. Eyrún Úa. Blue hour. Still from video work. 2025. 5 The overall experience of the work is slow, and one needs to pause a bit to notice the details that change. Those who walk past without pausing therefore see only a fragment of these moments, and this is done deliberately. The composition is such that in themselves these could be three photographs, or for that matter paintings, that stand together visually whenever they are viewed. Viewers can see frozen moments, but if they take the time and allow themselves to sense these boundaries between the real world and the dream world, they become aware of the time that passes through and affects everything it touches. Eyrún U) a Þorbjörnsdóttir Tell a story, dream a dream Dream Artist Creation Final Project for BA Degree Iceland University of the Arts Department of Fine Arts Spring Semester 2025