FAYERWEATHER GALLERY
NORDIC POSTMODERNISM
Exhibit Open
November 2 -30, 2001
Participants:
Hanna Holma
Eeva-Liisa Isomaa
Artist in Residence
Marja Kolu
from Kuopio, Finland
Oct.11-Nov.3
Fictions, Games, TrueRoles, Puzzles
by Dean Dass
We walk with Juha-Pekka Inkinen on the Norwegian coast, Finnmark area, near Vardoe village. We see the remains of a fishing factory, abandoned equipment, and many kinds of rubbish washed up by the waves. We look from the shoreline out into the vast Arctic Ocean. We watch as Inkinen holds up various pieces of debris before the camera lens. The resulting photographs are startlingly acidic: a blurred yellow cloud blocks our view while the rocky coast and the great ocean recede. Inkinen writes,
"You can't rewind the wheel of progress, but you can swerve it to either side. Apocatastasis is a fiction, that there will be a time when everything reverts to its former state. These images take us to the shore of the Great Ocean, where the view is almost the same as it used to be over the prime sea in the beginnings of time. But something is still left from the old world. It creaks at its joints, before the last details have been repaired, and everything returns as before."
Eeva-Liisa Isomaa travels somewhere much nearer to us, and more familiar: she has photographed Niagara Falls. But here again, why can't we see it clearly? What is wrong with the view? In her waterfalls we seem to remember something only vaguely. Isomaa takes us seductively toward representation but also denies it. Is this a new romantic strategy? Perhaps by moving toward an indeterminate [perhaps indeterminable?] surface she would precisely locate our time and place.
Marja Kolu employs a strategy of inversion and uncovering in this exhibition. For her also things are not always what they seem. We can find her in every Flea market. She has for years collected the most delicate fabrics and lace curtains from southeastern Finland and the former province of Karelia. But these beautiful fabrics now assembled in our gallery do more than evoke a nostalgic time in some undeterminable past, for Karelia is a loaded term, and refers to the Winter War, when Russia invaded and later annexed this province. Many thousands of Finns fled. In the installations of Marja Kolu, simple everyday objects have often turned against us like this, awakening deadlier troubled memories.
Nordic artists today have many such strategies for opening up the multiple layers of history, for calling into question 'national' identities and for fragmenting and even betraying the voice of the individual artist in relation to cultural identity. Offering the viewer [merely?] a game, revamping Informalism, or appropriating an equal mix of High & Low - such strategies undermine a stable meaning or call into question a previous modernist dictum. Jyrki Puhakka comes out of the forest of Finnish national identity bearing his sculptures made of wood and stone. But they have been scorched and scarified. Can these fetishized part-objects ever substitute for the whole body? His doll extraordinarily crafted of birch bark seems to come from some strange future, not from the reassuring world of Scandinavian Modernist design. Kjetil Ingvar Berge, a Norwegian living in London, casts the odd detritus of our lives in plaster or concrete, thereby creating neo-minimalist objects. 'To cast in stone' takes on a lighter weight, although no less strikingly beautiful.
The question of role-playing enters the work of Berge in his photograph from the bedroom. He writes:
"I woke up one morning before my lover and started playing with face masks I'd bought in Prague. I wear the chicken mask while I place the wolf mask in front of his sleeping face therefore enacting a tableau with role and masquerade of the predator and preyed-upon within any relationship."
Identity as a kind of role likewise enters the delicate etchings and photogravures of Piia Lehti, which she describes as being both "like a puzzle" and "an ongoing visual diary". It is her face on every character: "there are so many different sides of ourselves." What is true and what is imagined?
For a number of years Hanna Holma has worked almost exclusively in the medium of monotype. This medium has every connotation of unbridled painterly self-expression, a kind of modernist vice. Yet in her hands, while remaining joyously light, these monotypes seem to be a very close scrutiny of something - but of what? She writes of her "endeavor to be in contact with the mycelia of life under the outer structures and circumstances of normal living." Without the representation, this colorist of rare ability dares to offer the very image of inspection and examination.
Jyrki Markkanen, a fixture for many years at the prestigious Grafiikkakeskus in Jyväskylä, has worked exclusively within the craft-laden tradition of etching and the graphic arts. Rarely has this tradition seen such delightful wit and sense of play. His compendium of one hundred images is saturated with clichés from popular culture and entertainment. Daisy Duck joins the mythically heroic cowboy, now in the "Wild North" rather than the Wild West. Revolvers couple with VW Beetles. And more. The lighthearted play in this multi-directional narrative structure of recycled and appropriated images seems to mask darker themes for Markkanen and his viewer. Is meaning a fiction, or to be found merely tangentally? Which is the voice of the artist, if any? In effect Markkanen says the opposite of what he means in order to mean the opposite of what he says. Brian Eno's method of "oblique strategy" comes to mind.
So in the end what are we left with? Even more questions. It seems there is industrial debris along the far reaches of the Arctic Ocean; there is a MacDonalds even in Jyväskylä. There is a strange birch doll emerging from some future forest near Joensuu: Welcome to the exhibition!
All quotes from the artists come from their written statements, conversations held in their studios, or from a conversation held while swimming in the cold depths of Lake Saimaa.