IMMERSIO – Anna Hyrkkänen & Teemu Kangas
Hyrkkänen & Kangas are an artist couple whose work is united by an interest in the immersive power of experiencing and creating art. Immersion is about deep engagement and interaction with something. The viewer, experiencer, and creator of art can all immerse themselves in both the experience and creation of art. Immersion is a continuum that can manifest as both a physical and mental state.
Anna Hyrkkänen’s light installation forms a whole that expresses the interconnectedness of the human body, mind, brain, and consciousness. The white space is a surface, just as the skin is a surface on our body. The white space and objects represent the structures of the mind: a kind of model or map. The model created by the brain is the basis for interpretations of external world events and the experience of self. In the exhibition, moving colored projections are cast onto the shapes: a touch on the skin creates a vibration on the white surface – something happens.
At the heart of Hyrkkänen’s work is the delicate balance of body awareness. Awareness of one’s own body is created in the brain by combining information from the visual, tactile, and balance senses. Sometimes this combination fails for some reason, resulting in strange experiences such as the feeling of body distortion, déjà vu, or an out-of-body experience. The neural matrix in which we live stretches and shapes according to the demands of the situation.
Teemu Kangas’s works depict an arctic world of fire and ice, which seems to be in the grip of violent upheavals. Among the landscape depictions are both portraits and works at various levels of abstraction. The works can be interpreted as depicting the state of both the mind and our world.
The dominant piece in Kangas’s collection is an animation, with images created individually using a brush and ink. The work draws attention to temporality: the changes in the earth’s crust accelerate, mountains begin to flow, and millennia flash before our eyes. Observing the infinity of time creates a unique transcendence: when subjective everyday experiences are placed in relation to the infinite, a sense of trust and a glimmer of hope can emerge.
Anna Hyrkkänen (b. 1979) and Teemu Kangas (b. 1980) are visual artists from Tampere who graduated as visual artists from Satakunta University of Applied Sciences in 2005 and 2004, and as Masters from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2010 and 2015. Hyrkkänen mainly works with light installations and kinetic elements. Kangas primarily works with black-and-white ink drawings and sculptures. Their works have been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions both domestically and internationally.
www.annahyrkkanen.com, www.teemukangas.com
The exhibition has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Oskar Öflund Foundation.
Translated with Copilot