Silhouettes and Shadows, Kerava Art Museum, Finland, 2019
Diorama (Greek ”διοράω”, ”transparent”) is a wall-mounted display window containing carefully fabricated replicas of nature, where each synthetic grass, tree, taxidermied animal and bird become parts of spellbinding landscapes. Constructed as hyperrealistic illusions, the diorama’s expand far beyond their walls into endless terrains – from windswept and dry deserts to dark polar forests, where wolfs leap forward frozen in mid-air. In these hermetically sealed, melancholy and lost worlds the flow of time seems to have come to a halt. Everything is still, as if waiting for a distant storm to arrive.
Measured Silence consists of 80 slides photographed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. As in censored texts and images, all wildlife has been erased from the slides, creating a random system of white squares in each image. The work touches on various subjects connected to our relationship with nature, from our blindness towards the nature in ourselves, to the need of turning the uncontrollable into something controlled.
Measured Silence is a collaboration between Saara Ekström and Thom Vink
Installation image credits: Pekka Elomaa, Kerava Art Museum, 2019