Anna Joelsdottir discovered she had a hearing impairment when she was in her mid-30s, in about 1982. She was having dinner at home in Reykjavik, Iceland, and her husband asked one of their kids to turn off a game-playing device because of its annoying sound. She couldn’t hear it. Tests revealed that she had a problem with high-frequency sounds, possibly a lifelong condition. “It explained a lot of things,” she says. From an early age, and without realizing she was doing it, she’d been reading lips. She’d long disliked large social gatherings–and came to think it was because it was hard for her to understand voices in a crowd. That struggle to discover ordered communication within cacophony is one of the influences on her recent work at Zg, seductively complex paintings composed of orderly stripes and extremely intricate, almost clotted line drawings.
