Eyes as Big as Plates – Exhibition
Eyes as Big as Plates (NO/FI)
Opening June 1st at 6 pm. Welcome!
Eyes as Big as Plates is a photographic art project that started in 2011 by looking at personifications of nature in folklore on the southwest coast of Norway. Since its inception, the project has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s affinity to nature and a quest to understand our relationship with our surroundings.
The ongoing series consists of over sixty portraits, produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety-year-old parachutists from around the world from a dozen countries. The senior models are people the artists meet through friends, relatives and newspaper ads, in hardware stores, noodle bars, indoor gardening society meetings, swimming pools, senior centers, on the city streets etc. The artists’ creative point of departure lies in the collaboration with these contributors, who they consider as co-creators.
In 2013, the artists Karoline Hjorth (NO) and Riita Ikonen (FI) toured the Reykjanes peninsula and produced new works in collaboration with the locals they met. Nordic House in Reykjavik is hosting the Icelandic debut of these works and presents a wide look into the six year-long adventures of the series including the brand-new book.
Based on conversations with the participating seniors, each image presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Nature acts as both content and context and the characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures made in collaboration with the artists. 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.
The exhibition in Reykjavik is funded by Nordic Culture Point, Norwegian-Icelandic Cultural Cooperation and FRAME- Contemporary Art Finland.
A special edition book, published by the Norwegian publisher Press, will arrive in bookshops around the world in September 2017. You can sign up for your copy by emailing eyesasbigasplates@gmail.com
More information: www.eyesasbigasplates.com
