Measured Silence

SILHOUETTES AND SHADOWS, Kerava Art Museum, Finland, 2019

Diorama (Greek ”διοράω”, ”transparent”) is a wall-mounted display window, containing meticulously constructed landscapes where each synthetic grass, puddle and taxidermied animal become parts of spellbinding replicas of nature – a kind of melancholy and uncanny Nature Mortes. Constructed as hyperrealistic illusions, the diorama’s expand far beyond their walls into endless terrains – from lush and humid rainforests to polar winter nights, where wolfs leap forward in mid-air. In these hermetically sealed and silent worlds the flow of time seems to stand still, as if waiting for a distant storm to arrive.

Measured Silence consists of 80 slides photographed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. As in censored texts and images, all wildlife has been erased from the slides, creating a random system of white squares in each image. The work touches on various subjects, from our blindness towards the nature in ourselves, to the need of turning the uncontrollable into something controlled.

Measured Silence is a collaboration between Saara Ekström and Thom Vink

Installation image credits: Pekka Elomaa, Kerava Art Museum, 2019