Iceberg Stranded in My Bed
Iceberg Stranded in My Bed
By Faune Ybarra
In Iceberg Stranded in My Bed (2020), Mexican-born artist Faune Ybarra responds to the book Through Newfoundland with the Camera (1905). The book by Robert Edwards Holloway, first printed over a hundred years ago, has served as a photographic and print archive of Newfoundland. Over time, the archive has become an influential source of imagery about the province.
To create Iceberg Stranded in My Bed, Ybarra projected Holloway’s photograph of an iceberg captioned “Iceberg Stranded Outside St. John’s Harbour for Three Weeks”, on the wall above her bed in her Vancouver home. She filmed herself dancing between the wall and the projector while shrouded in a crumpled white sheet. Ybarra considers this performance part of a series of “diasporic gestures” which she describes as “actions to ground oneself to the currently inhabited land.”
For Capture Photography Festival, four stills from Ybarra’s video of the performance have been reshot as photographs. The resulting images will be installed at the Aberdeen station. Two photographs will be installed on each of the two columns at the station.
Ybarra began working on Iceberg Stranded in My Bed at the beginning of the pandemic, during the initial shutdown, after moving Vancouver from St Johns where she had lived for four years. As a result, the work speaks to the artist’s feelings of solitude and confinement during those initial stages of the pandemic when we were in lockdown.
