SATURDAY 18TH MAY

Leah will present new works for her upcoming exhibition, “Cloud-Scale Uncertainties," including several made in response to her time at Hyytiälä. In this work, she explores and abstracts the shifting relationships between measurement and uncertainty as they relate to landscape and weather at a variety of scales. Leah is deeply committed to investigating the roles that images and uncertainty play in science and art. In science, the primary goal is to reduce uncertainty, whereas in art, one goal is to sustain or heighten it. In this moment of climate uncertainty, attempts to describe climate systems — and understanding what cannot be described — are of critical importance. 

Leah Beeferman works with digital image-making, video, text, and sound. She has had solo exhibitions at Rawson Projects, New York; Sorbus, Helsinki; CO-OPt, Texas; and Arcade on Stadium, Utah. Recent group shows include Helsinki Art Museum and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Penumbra, New York and Peeler Art Center, Indiana. Beeferman has participated in residencies including LMCC Workspace, New York; The Arctic Circle, Svalbard; Tiputini Biodiversity Research Station, Ecuador; and Climate Whirl/Hyytiälä Forest Station, Finland. Her work has been discussed in publications such as BOMB and Objektiv, and she has written texts for Contemporary Art Stavanger and Taupe Magazine and published artist books with Lodret Vandret and Rooftop Press. Beeferman received a Fulbright Grant to Finland (2016) and is now based in Providence, where she teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.

More: https://www.leahbeeferman.com/

Andrzej Tarasiuk is a Polish-Canadian artist, living in Finland and working on a Masters in Creative Sustainability at Aalto University. His work questions the kind of future we are creating by closely examining relationships between nature, technology and built environment. He is particularly interested in exploring a future where we rely on technological analogs, like Mechanical Trees, to support or replace ecosystem services.

Mechanical Trees originated at the 2018 Labverde residency in the Brazilian Amazon where he learned about the Biotic Pump Theory of how forest move water inland and the likelihood of the Amazon system collapsing because of human actions. Co-opting the “techno-fix” ideology he first imagined the Amazon and later different urban centers adopting these Mechanical Trees as part of their climate change infrastructure. Absurdist at first, the work evolved to provide a new way of understanding the role and function of natural systems.

Through his thesis Andrzej is investigating the role technology should/could play in mitigating climate crisis issues, in part, by developing a Mechanical Tree – Wool Canopy Unit (MT-WCU) for urban centres that are dealing with industrial legacy and climate change issues. MT-WCU is inspired by wools properties being not unlike that of foliage in terms of moisture/heat management, and pollution/sound absorption. The project also touches on material and knowledge blind spots created by capitalist economy and mechanization resulting in wool being largely considered a waste material, lack of heterogeneous variety in textile fibers and exclusion of pre-industrial knowledge wealth often held by indigenous and craft communities.

Working in different media, Fabian Heller's works are closely tied to themes of nature, the Anthropocene, and the framework of human images creation. From digital algorithms and pixel play to photography and sculpture,he is always curious to create new images and visual impulses. He imagines an aesthetic that fuses ideas of the post-Anthropocene, and the dynamic of nature with the algorithmic search for new possible images. He currently lives and works in Kassel, Germany.

The landscape in its sheer magnitude and dynamic exceeds any frame and resolution, proving it impossible to create a single and absolute visual representation of it. Never the less, in his current artistic endeavours Fabian Heller tries anyway, aiming to capture as much as possible by widening his scope in terms of space, time and the change that gets born in between the two. This brief talk will outline some of the experimental techniques, both analog and digital that are part of his’s current field campaign in the landscape surrounding Hyytiälä.