Tomorrow’s News is an exhibition exchange project presenting works by six Canadian artists in Helsinki and works of Finnish artists in Ottawa. The exhibition in Helsinki is a cooperation between MUU gallery and Photographic Gallery Hippolyte. The project was initiated by Paula Toppila from FRAME(Finnish Fund for Art Exchange) and Jen Budney from Gallery 101.
A year ago, Paula Toppila and Jen Budney agreed to organize an exchange exhibition between artists from their home countries. They already knew that Canada and Finland have a lot in common: beyond cold weather, indigenous issues, and a love of ice hockey, these two nations share a deep interest in the development and deployment of new media and telecommunications technologies. With this in mind, curators circulated identical calls-for-submissions to artists in both countries, looking for works that deal with issues of mass media, telecommunications, and documentary. Tomorrow's News at galleries MUU and Hippolyte presents the Canadian response to this call.
The six artists in this exhibition come from a variety of backgrounds, and they bring to the show six unique sets of perspectives and tactics. Jen Budney cites a few major themes, including: a questioning of fixed meanings to the written word, the multiple ways technology mediates nature and landscape, and the individual's power to appropriate corporate or state technology for more liberating means. All of the artworks in this exhibition are consciously provocative, asking the viewer to play close attention and to rethink first impressions.
From the west coast to the east coast of Canada, the artists in this exhibition span seven thousand kilometres. Milutin Gubash makes his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, but his photographic and text works from the series "Playing Possum" (1999-present) deal with news reports of local events from a daily newspaper in Calgary, Alberta. This city, which is characterized by its big oil industry, frontier culture, and sprawling suburbs, is where the artist was raised. He focuses on tragic stories of trauma and transformation, aiming to subvert and personalize the news format through re-examinations of the places where these stories occurred. Along with his works at Hippolyte, Gubash has distributed thousands of brochures throughout the city of Helsinki, in order to bring his recontextualization into another realm of the everyday.
Isabelle Hayeur, from Montreal, Quebec, focuses on other sorts of "non-sites": wastelands, abandoned industrial sites, and modified natural environments. Her large colour images from the series "Uncertain Landscapes" (1998-2000) portray seemingly familiar landscapes, the kinds we pass while driving on highways or on the margins of cities. However, these images have been subtly manipulated through digital photomontage, creating a mood of indefinable irreality. Hayeur's images reiterate the constant interference that human activities enact upon the landscape, and her implicit questioning of the "truth" of nature (as well as the truth of photography) should resonate strongly in Finland, as it does in Canada.
Luis Jacob, who lives in Toronto, brings his “Templates for Walking Theatre” to Hippolyte. Previously presented in Detroit and Capetown, these are messages or lines of text directly applied to the gallery’s floor. Blending fact and fiction, and alluding to news, popular music, and commercial fictions, “Templates” elicits the bodily participation of its audience. Visitors are compelled to move along and between the texts, as the messages can be read only by approaching them from different directions. The artist states, “Here, language is something one does.” This work empowers readers to make a bodily connection to ideas, to negotiate meaning through physical and material experiences.
Ottawa artist Jason St-Laurent typically confronts the public through guerilla-style performances and his own curatorial projects. At Muu, he takes on world history, morality, and psychology with large-scale signatures of the men who Time magazine nominated as the ten most influential individuals of the 20th century. Among these men are Winston Churchill, Che Guevara and Adolph Hitler. St-Laurent asks viewers to take on the role of graphologists, to see if the signatures give away any sign of the authors’ heroic or monstrous characters. This work is also a wry comment on the morally ambiguous proposition of Time’s list, and it questions the value of a "world history" that’s written from the perspective only of those who wield power.
Recently relocated from Vancouver to Montreal, Quebec, Tagny Duff makes "performative intervention" or "live art" the starting point for her work, which investigates relationships between individual bodies and electronically mediated apparatuses of power. One of her interests is surveillance technologies, and here she notes that both Finland and Canada are actively expanding CCTV, Webcams and wireless communications systems in urban centres to monitor the public. These technologies do not necessarily prevent crime, but accumulate excessive data information that can be intentionally or unintentionally misread and misused. In Helsinki, she sets out to create images and text that will present an enigma to the coded eyes of the surveillance camera that has been installed on top of the tower of the Finnish Broadcasting Company for the past six years.
Tim Dallett, who has lately left the east coast city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the prairie city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, takes over the nighttime at Muu gallery with "Flowchart." This real-time performance/installation occurs during the few dark hours of Helsinki's summer nights, when the artist "processes" or demolishes electronic equipment according to a large-scale flowchart drawn on the gallery floor. Video cameras and microphones collect images and sounds of the performer, the chart and the materials as they move around the space. The video images are mixed and projected on translucent screens in the windows of the gallery that face the street. A soundtrack to the performance is broadcast over the telephone, which viewers can dial in to, using their mobile phones, in order to listen while observing from the street.
Tim Dallett’s video performance Flowchart can be seen in the windows of MUU gallery 25.5.-1.6. at 11:30pm-4:00am..
The Finnish part of the Tomorrow’s News project was shown at Gallery 101 in Ottawa 24th of April-31st of May 2003. The exhibition was curated by Paula Toppila. The artists taking part in the exhibition were Jari Silomäki, Minna Heikinaho, Jiri Geller, Juha Mäki-Jussila, Lena Séraphin, Juha Huuskonen and Iconoclast group.
