FRIÐGEIR

Excerpts from a documentary made by Þorgeir Guðmundsson

On the occasion of the opening of this exhibition by my dear old friend Friðgeir Trausti Helgason, I will be showing a few excerpts from my upcoming (work-in-progress) documentary about Friðgeir.

Friðgeir and I have been circling each other throughout our lives, although sometimes at a great distance. When I was living in San Francisco as a young man, he was living in Los Angeles, and when I was studying in New York, he was down in New Orleans. When our paths did cross, there was much to celebrate.

Friðgeir would sometimes disappear for years at a time, but then he would pop up again in the most unlikely of places. The hard-living rocker had suddenly turned up as a chef at some of the finest restaurants in New Orleans. And then later, after hitting rock bottom, he rose to become an artist, a photographer and a world traveler.

This film grew out of a longing to get back on the road with this old friend to see where that road might take us, to tell the wild and crazy story of this extraordinary character by exploring past adventures and forging new ones. This journey is nowhere near its end and the next steps are not entirely clear, but as I piece together these excerpts, they begin to divine the way forward.

Þorgeir Guðmundsson