Worlds End Highway
Kallio Kunsthalle, Helsinki, Finland. 2014.
Worlds End Highway, takes its name from a particular stretch of road in South Australia, evocative of landscape ideologies past and present and also the notion that a particular afterimage might be translated to another continent, out of time. In this case a spontaneous durational performative installation made in the northern hemisphere’s distinctive strange blue light of midnight, on the front window of Kallio Kunsthalle in Helsinki, Finland.
At first glance the idyllic ‘afterimages’ in Worlds End Highway – the gold spired Lutheran church, palm tree and golden light glowing in harmony with dominant Formal Finnish religion; but then the apparently abstracted clarity of the white chalk residue of the window drawing is dissonant and Informal. Somehow in their simultaneity another sense of spatiality becomes visible.
In this way, the historical substance and the contemporary veneer of ‘landscape’as ‘a way of being’ and interacting in the world, are indelibly connected to contemporary intercultural spatiality. The landscape view itself, now mediated by the classic 16:9 screen has become a deliberate reduction of the original. Ever-since the earliest known artistic shift to ‘representing’ identity as landscape in Europe – seen for example in rock engravings of northern Italy – ‘landscape’ has been subjected to eons of unrealistic reductionism and expansion. Yet the contemporary format remains. The ‘landscape’ media screen, the wall, the room, a construction, a view, a restrictive visual spatiality.
Special Thanks: Petri Saarikko, Kallio Kunsthalle, Helsinki.
© Jonathan Kimberley 2014.
