May 1 - 30, 2021
There will be no Opening Reception for this Exhibition
After a very long year, the Dedee Shattuck Gallery is pleased to reopen with our 2021 inaugural exhibit Eyes as Big as Plates: A Second Look at the Work of Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth. Visitors to the gallery will recognize these photographs from our 2019 group show, Should We Go Outside? A Nordic Quartet. Finnish-Norwegian duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth’s collaborative photographs were favorites of the gallery staff and visitors, and we can think of no better way kick off our 2021 season by revisiting work that we love.
In these photographs, retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, artists, academics and many others pose as solitary figures in landscape, dressed in elements of their surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. As the artists write: “Here, nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape.” Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature.
Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth
Eyes as Big as Plates
Website | Riitta Ikonen CV | Karoline Hjorth CV
Biography
Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen have collaborated since 2011 on several projects, including Eyes as Big as Plates (2011 -), The World in London with The Photographer’s Gallery (2012), The Lumber Room (2013), Time is a ship that never casts anchor (2014-18) and People of Dronningens gate (2018). Their work has been shown at Museum of Contemporary Arts Kiasma (Finland), The Chimney gallery NYC, Pioneer Works/ Recess (NYC), Bogota International Photo Biennale, Landskrona Fotofestival, Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Shoot Gallery (Oslo), Kunsthall Grenland (Porsgrunn), Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art (Norway), National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (touring exhibition with DKS, Norway), NADA Miami, Art Toronto, Seibu Shibuya (Tokyo), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (US), The Finnish Institute in Oslo, Paris and Stockholm, The Nordic House in Reykjavik, Palazzo Borghese, Gallery Del Cembalo (Italy), Gallery FACTORY & SEOULLO (South Korea), Landskrona Fotofestival (Sweden) and the National Museum of Greenland amongst others. Their recent publication Eyes as Big as Plates was nominated for the ‘Best First Photobook’ prize at the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Awards in 2017 and won ‘Best book cover in Norway’ (Årets vakreste Bøker) 2018. Their collaboration continues in 2019 with new works and exhibitions planned in Senegal, Norway and USA.
Artist Statement
Eyes as Big as Plates is the ongoing collaborative project by the Norwegian-Finnish artist duo Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen. Starting out in 2011 studying personifications of nature and folkloric explanations to natural phenomenons in Norway, the project has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. Driven by curiosity and imagination, the artists have travelled to a thirteen countries on a quest to understand our relationship with our surroundings, and the series has grown to over ninety portraits.
Part sculpture, part installation and part photography, Ikonen and Hjorth work together from beginning to the end of the process with their different complementing skills. The series is created in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety-year-old parachutists. As the project continues to cross borders, it also aims to rediscover a demographic group too often labeled as marginalized, and to generate new perspectives on who we are and where we belong.
