While the rays of the midnight sun make the height of summer prime season for tourists to experience the beauty of Icelandic nature, New Year’s Eve has become a popular time for foreigners and Icelanders alike to enjoy a different sort of beauty. Over Reykjavík and its surrounding suburbs, the sky itself seems to explode as fireworks blossom like chrysanthemums across the urban horizon; families and friends gather around bonfires with their heads tilted back to take in the spectacle. As hundreds of tons of fireworks go up in smoke, disappearing just as soon as they bloom, there is something about splendor of such limited temporality and tangibility that makes it all the more magical. And who can own something that exists but for mere moments in the sky? “Even though you didn’t put them up in the air, they’re yours,” artist Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir explained to me, “and once you shoot them off, they’re not yours anymore, but something for everyone to enjoy.”

The fireworks Hekla ignites are less ephemeral, more corporeal, and while they are just as beautiful as the real thing, they are pyrotechnics of another ilk. Her celebrated installation—or to use the term she prefers, constellation—Fireworks for LA (2005) features large light sculptures constructed from a rainbow of cold cathode lights that react to pre-recorded sounds of real explosions. Connected to a speaker system, the branching lights come alive in front of a projected video of an actual fireworks display. Suspended precariously from the gallery ceiling with their tangles of wires and cords intentionally conspicuous, the lights blink and flash in their dynamic dialogue with the audio and video, but with a sort of relative permanence that actual fireworks can never have. Dedicated to the residents of Los Angeles, for whom it is illegal to ignite fireworks on New Year’s Eve, Hekla’s Fireworks in the gallery delight the senses in a different way: their magic is not a trick, their gimmick not concealed. The cathode lights, held together with hot glue that barely sustains the sculpture during the course of the exhibition, are fighting against gravity to remain in the air; their bulky materiality and machine-like quality are contrary to the weightlessness of the fireworks they purport to represent. At the same time, Hekla pushes her materials to their very limits, their extremes, and the Fireworks she creates resemble fireworks at their most extreme moment – the height of the explosion and expansion of energy. Understanding the mechanism of a firework can be reduced to a chemical reaction as matter changes state. But, Hekla says, “the magic moment is in your head.”

Magic has been a connecting thread in Hekla’s work since she began exhibiting internationally in 1999. Hekla studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts, received both her BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and has also studied at universities in Germany and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (U.S.). In the summer of 2007, Hekla’s solo show “Liminality” at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, which featured older and recent works, received wide acclaim. Her growing reputation and exhibition record both in Iceland – including shows at the National Gallery and the Reykjavík Art Museum, Kjarvalsstađir – and abroad secured her nomination for the 2007 Icelandic Visual Arts Awards. One of the founders of Reykjavík’s Kling & Bang Gallery in 2003, Hekla has also curated several exhibitions including the 2006 show “Hugris” by the Austrian performance group Gelitin; she has also lectured at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. Upcoming on her calendar is a group show in Calgary in April and participation in the Reykjavík Arts Festival in May.

Just as Hekla’s Fireworks fight against the limits of their materials, her work also fights against the possibility of being decorative – as must the work of any artist aiming to create something beautiful. Despite her wires and electronics, beauty and magic are not stripped away, neither in Fireworks nor in her other works that are inspired by and refer to other real-life, time-based events placed in unlikely contexts. Her piece Fire, FireFire, FireFireFire (2006) is constructed in a similar fashion, with sound-reacting cold cathode lights assembled to resemble small campfires physically responding to music and visually interacting with projected videos of actual flames. Likewise, her Fountain (2006) and Talking Fountain (2007) follow in this format. Earlier works include photographs, video, and other installations wherein sculptures respond – whether physically or conceptually – to pre-recorded sound.

In so many of Hekla’s works, the combination of the unmistakably manufactured materials and the essential quality of the natural phenomena they mimic might be seen as a statement on the way nature itself has been harnessed, in a way, or conceptually reshaped in the collective consciousness of today’s urban society – but this analysis misses the mark. More important is the pure sensual allure of experiencing Hekla’s artworks. Her piece Wishing Well, which was part of her constellation Perfect Moment (2005), refers to the age-old act of dropping coins along with hopes and longings into a well. “When people make a wish,” Hekla says, “they make it with money.” But for her, the wishing well need not be a comment on materialism or wealth. Instead, it “transforms money, the most material symbol, into something magical.” And the quintessence of magic, and of Hekla’s art, is to lose oneself in it, suspending belief in exchange for enchantment.