October 30 - December 1
Opening Reception
Saturday November 9, 5-7pm
These artists present a multi-media vision of our relationship to nature within the specific context of the Anthropocene—this epoch in which humans play an outsized role on Earth and its rhythms.
In Riitta Ikonen’s and Karoline Hjorth’s collaborative 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…The project aims to generate new perspective on who we are and where we belong.” Cecilia (Cissi) Hultman works with drawing, text and installation from a conceptual perspective: “I believe in a practice that lets drawing and sculpture coexist,” she writes, “associatively playful with detail precision.” Finally, artist a rawlings presents a vision of the Isle of Mull, Scotland, in video and print, considering how to perform geochronology in the Anthropocene.
Both playful and serious, this talented collective from the north poses big questions in elegant and contemporary visual language.
Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth
Eyes as Big as Plates
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.
Cecilia Hultman
Visual artist from Sweden (b.1985)
Working with drawing, text and
installations from a conceptual,
precise and poetic perspective
I believe in a practice that lets drawing and sculpture coexist,
associatively playful with detailed precision.
For this occasion I have drawn The Drawing Sculpture Park
with the addition of drawing related objects in the scale
of the left out area. Since I like to think about drawing as
translation, I see upon the scale shift as a way to make things
intimate and concentrated. I also like to emphasize drawing
specific gestures; choosing, leaving out, erase, add or skew
things a bit.
The other drawing constellation Paths of Layers highlights
the commonness between graphite drawing and the earth;
layers. Layers + surfaces, piled up into a three dimensional pillar
with an eraser on top, visually in line with the drawn squared
formed landscape.
In Never Caught Butterflies I let the idea of collecting the
most beautiful things around you deal with my drawing
specific material.
a rawlings
Biography
a rawlings is a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist whose books include Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), Gibber (online, 2012), o w n (CUE BOOKS, 2015), and si tu (MaMa Multimedijalni Institut, 2017). Her book Wide slumber was adapted to music theatre by Valgeir Sigurðsson and VaVaVoom (2014). Her libretti include Bodiless (for composer Gabrielle Herbst, 2014) and Longitude (for Davíð Brynjar Franzson, 2014). rawlings’ Áfall / Trauma was shortlisted for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights (2013). She is one-half of the performance duo Völva with Maja Jantar and one-half of the new music duo Moss Moss Not Moss with Rebecca Bruton. rawlings is the recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship (2009-10) and held the position of Queensland Poet-in-Residence (2012). rawlings loves in Iceland.
Artist Statement
Description of SOUND OF MULL
Sound of Mull is a series of performance scores composed by a rawlings, considering how to perform geochronology in the Anthropocene—the proposed new epoch in which humans act as geologic forces—along North Atlantic foreshores. Published as a book, Sound of Mull includes instructions in how to listen to deep time, how to drown a violin, and how to knit plastic collected from shorelines, providing an evocative and engaging journey into rethinking foreshores. Climate change places foreshores as central players impacted by storminess, glacial melt, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification. The performance scores offer direct or imagined engagement with the multiple temporalities and more-than-human co-constituents of North Atlantic foreshores.
Description of HOW TO PERFORM GEOCHRONOLOGY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Excerpted from Sound of Mull, "How to Perform Geochronology in the Anthropocene" is a sonic meditation through deep time and speculative futures.
Description of INTIME
Excerpted from Sound of Mull, "Intime" features circular performance on foreshores around the North Atlantic in Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Scotland, and Sweden. The durational performance embodies the counter-clockwise collusion of wind currents over the North Atlantic from the North Atlantic Drift, Irminger Current, and Labrador Current. These wind currents carry storms from the Eastern United States Seaboard over to the UK, upwards along the Scandinavian coastline, and then over the south of Iceland.
"Intime" also includes performance of knitting plastic bags harvested partly from the immediate foreshore and shoreline of Loch Long, Scotland. Visual artist Laureen Burlat (FR) tears the collected plastic bags into strips when, tied together, make plastic yarn. She then knits a long body-width train over the course of three months. When she is finished, she ties the train to her wrists and wades shoulder-deep into the Loch from where the plastic washed ashore, and from where we watch nuclear-missile submarines deploy into and return from the North Atlantic.
"Intime" features wind maps from earthschool.null.net, as well as footage from the Accelerator Mass Spectrometre and Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre.
Performers in these littoral events are: Laureen Burlat and angela rawlings (Scotland); Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, Stefan Östersjö, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Lan Yến, Kent Olofsson, angela rawlings, and Gina the Toy Poodle (Sweden); angela rawlings, Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, Sachiko Murakami, and Steinar Bragi (Iceland); and Cissi Hultman, Baby Alvin, Heli Aaltonen, Dea Antonsen, Ida Bencke, Rosemary Lee, Kim Ménage, Elena Lundquist Ortíz, angela rawlings, and Libe García Zarranz (Norway).
