Joan Jonas.

"Volcano Saga" is an imaginative storytelling stemming from a thirteenth-century Icelandic myth. Sitting in hot springs, a woman recounts four mysterious dreams while her male companion interprets the tales. Each dream features the loss of a headdress or ring. The man interprets these items to represent the four husbands that the woman will have. The video frames the myth of Gudrun with a reallife story. In the video Jonas recounts that in the course of gathering footage for the work she traveled to a scenic region of Iceland; a storm suddenly rose and her car was blown off the road. Jonas implies that this harrowing event connects her to Iceland's preternatural terrain and to the vicissitudes of Gudrun s life. This autobiographical introduction is one of the many layers and folds of illusion and reality that vitalize Volcano Saga. The work is intricate, consonant with the perplexing ideas that science and technology contributed to everyday life in the final decades of the twentieth century.

VHS