AIR AND OTHER ELEMENTS – LAURI ANTTILA, MARIANNE HESKE, IAN MCKEEVER
Exhibition at Pori Art Museum, July 31 – September 13, 1992
Expedition to Siberia, Chukchi Peninsula, August 1–20, 1992
Lauri Anttila, Marianne Heske, and Ian McKeever base their work on nature and the understanding of it. For them, analyzing nature involves observation on both intellectual and emotional levels, where the systematic approach and methods borrow from natural sciences, while artistic work serves as a personal and intuitive interpretation. All three artists are wanderers by nature, but each in their own way.
For Finnish artist Lauri Anttila, expeditions aim to uncover cultural-historical and scientific contexts as a foundation for his artistic interpretations. Marianne Heske, a Norwegian cosmopolitan, finds her ultimate environment in the traditional Norwegian mountain landscape. Meanwhile, English artist Ian McKeever maps the entire world, particularly areas unfamiliar to him and therefore intriguing.
“Can art be measured, or must the concept stretch?” asked Marianne Heske in her 1984 video work. In this piece, she handed a tape measure and a rubber band to her audience, asking whether these objects could be compared to art. The work served as a metaphor for the hyper-materialistic consumer society of recent decades, which has objectified art to the extreme. It relates to the conceptualization of contemporary art, capable of critically examining itself—questioning its existence, necessity, and meaning.
The pursuit of the essential and the attempt to reveal the “hidden” side of things and phenomena is another common denominator among the artists featured in this exhibition.
Lauri Anttila, a pioneer of Finnish conceptual art since the 1960s, is deeply interested in the act of perception. He distances his subject matter by stripping it down to its essentials. Stones, air, coal, soot, ash, or even sound—translated into photographic series, paintings, drawings, or sound recordings—make intangible and invisible elements perceptible and experiential. Time and memory, as central elements of his works, emphasize the role of the subject. The viewer’s cultural background, learned and experienced past, provides the works with their true meaning. However, how these fragmentary pieces relate to our overall worldview ultimately depends on our capacity for openness and sensitivity.
Marianne Heske explores perception and the relationship between culture and nature in her monumental landscape paintings, created using video cameras and computers. Her video camera filters focus on unspoiled, archetypal landscapes such as mountains, fjords, valleys, and glaciers. These landscapes serve as metaphors for how what we see and experience is astonishingly pre-defined by cultural norms. The mechanisms of cultural background, preconceptions, and preferences dominate perception. Her methodical, technology-driven approach reflects something not inherently present in nature but constructed within the mind of the artist or viewer. The moral aspect of Heske’s work ties to its fragmentary and reductive nature, revealing humanity’s alienation from nature.
Ian McKeever investigates the concept of the landscape. While his work clearly connects to the tradition of English romantic landscape painting, his true background lies in conceptual art. The landscape serves as a deliberately chosen starting point—a medium for examining various methods of representation and their interpretations through personal experience, yet at a distance from himself and the everyday.
Publication:
ISBN 951-9355-47-2
Ikijää – Permafrost – Merslota
Editing: Yrjö Haila, Marketta Seppälä
Design: Jari-Pekka Vanhala
©1995 Pori Art Museum, writers and photographers
Co-operation with: Ministry of Education, Nordic Committee of Art and Design, Porin Seudun Osuuspankki
Painohäme Oy, Ylöjärvi 1995
Translated with ChatGPT