| THE ECONOMIST presented by Contemporary Art Society |
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13 December 2000 - 21 January 2001
Axel Antas
Combining video, photographs and installation Antas draws upon the expansive landscape of his native Finland for inspiration. In his video The Middle and Everything Around Antas animates ink drawings of a bleak hillside landscape, punctuated intermittently with trees. In his photographic series, The Blue Hour, Antas is attempting to capture a magical quality in nature. Antas’s video projection Snowangels is a poetic gesture that draws upon a game which children play at winter time. We watch people making imprints of an angel, a symbol of eternity, which then slowly disappears and allows a new imprint to be made. A childlike wonder pervades this work, expressing a desire to escape the mortal and the material world. Antas graduated with a BA from Goldsmiths in 2000 and has exhibited in Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and London. Solo exhibitions have included Transient at Studio Mezzo and The Acrobat at Kari Kenetti Gallery, both in Helsinki. In 2001 Antas will be showing at Kuvataide Akatemian Galleria, Helsinki and at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London. The equipment has been generously supported by Goldsmiths College. Zoe Walker
For The Economist Plaza, Walker presents an illuminated photograph from her 1996 work Portable Paradise: an inflatable plastic bubble containing a scale-model tropical island scene. Urban living led Walker to build her own fantasy island, which she photographed at various locations within the city. The series of images for Portable Paradise reveals the artist physically inhabiting the life-size inflatable. It is as if she is contained in a glass-domed, ornamental snow scene. As in one of these scenes, Walker is caught in what looks like a flurry of snow in summer. Walker sees the island as a fictional place providing a focus for memories and desires. The work exposes the way in which consumer culture capitalises on fantasies by producing goods which might placate our desires in a quick but temporary way. The inevitable disappointment of the fake or material object is inherent in Walker’s work, although the promise of fulfilment lingers. Walker completed an MA at Goldsmiths College in 1996. She has recently undertaken a residency at Canberra School of Art, Australia. Having shown widely abroad and across the UK, she is currently exhibiting at An Ideal Home at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 24 November – 10 December 2000.
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My
work stands between reality and the imaginary, raising questions about
the individual: a being in a state of solitude in contrast to forever
transient surroundings. It can be seen as a reaction to life in an
urban landscape . . . a constant return to vast and open spaces, where
one can find freedom, either through thought or symbolic movement and
flight.
My
work is concerned with escapism. I work within the gap between the
commercial presentation and packaging of a place and the reality of
the particular location. I make objects which act as home crafted
escape devices. These objects are used as props in videos and
photographs which often emulate the kinds of images that are provided
for us through advertising or in films and therefore subconsciously
become a part of our own imagining.