House and Home / House and Garden, 2010

12 Super-8 films of various lengths.

These Super 8 films were made over a period of 15 – 20 years. Every year, beginning in the early spring, this man repetitively filmed the same flowerbeds, the same apple and pear trees and the same grapevines growing in this small garden of his house.

The sequences are slow and observational, lightly made with handheld camera and yet the silence of the Super 8 medium adds to the concentration and the intensity of the images. The repetitive nature of this subject creates a recurring universe, which becomes recognisable to the viewer after a few film rolls. Its action seems somehow obsessive and appears also to challenge the idea of whether the exotic could indeed be just outside the door, and to question at what point something becomes familiar and yet still maintains our interest.

 

2

A reading of and a response to the book Situation Aesthetics: The Work of Michael Asher by Kirsi Peltomäki, 2010

The publication Situation Aesthetics by Kirsi Peltomäki incl. underlining’s, texts and pictures on additional pages by Ursula Nistrup.

Earlier this month I discovered this new commentary on Michael Asher’s work. It is one of very few publications about his work and I was delighted when it appeared. Since studying with him in the fall of 2003 I have wanted to write to him, in order to share my thoughts with him and I now feel I have found a way to do this. In the spirit of his own practice, in which he adds very few elements to create an installation, and where very few traces are left after the work is removed, I would like to use this publication as the space for the letters, notes and ideas that I have and would like to pass on to him. I am writing in parallel to my reading of the book. And when this book is read and written I would like to send it to him. I would like to have only one copy of it made, in order to document what it has become, just as his works, once his show has come to an end, only exist through documentation.
This work is still in progress.