New: Eyes as Big as Plates Photographs
We are proud to present the Canadian premier of the collaborative photographic series “Eyes as Big as Plates”.
View Photographs, Watch Videos and Learn More About the Series HERE
Eyes as Big as Plates is the ongoing collaborative project between the Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth. 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. The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Since 2011 the artist duo has portrayed seniors in Norway, Finland, France, US, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden and Japan and Greenland added to the
list in 2015.
Inspired by characters from Nordic folklore, each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists. The production of each image further involves a certain collision of temporality: the fleeting instant of the photographic moment, the more ‘mythic’ time created within the image and the participants’ mental transition as they become one with their wearable sculpture and the surrounding natural landscape. As active participants in our contemporary society, these seniors encourage the rediscovery of a demographic group too often labelled as marginalized or even as a stereotypical cliché. It is in this light that the project aims to generate new perspectives on who we are and where we belong.
Eyes as Big as Plates is currently touring with the Norwegian National Museum and has previously been shown at Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Pioneer Works (NYC), The Finnish Institute in Oslo, Paris and Stockholm, Tetley Brewery (Leeds), Seibu Shibuya (Tokyo), Villa Borghese (Rome), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Nebraska US), and the Ars Fennica exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Arts Kiasma, Bogota International Photo Biennale (Colombia), gallery FACTORY in Seoul Korea and Finlandia University Gallery (Michigan US). The next stop for the series will be Nuuk Nordic (Greenland) in mid October. An internationalpublication is also in progress.