ECO–ART exhibit
Pori Art Museum, Finland.
Curators Peter Selz (USA)
& John K. Grande (Canada)
www.poriartmuseum.fi04 February – 29 May 2011
Artists:
Jan-Erik Andersson, Brandon Ballengée, Ciel Bergman, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Joyce Cutler-Shaw,
Agnes Denes, Chris Drury, Michael Flomen, Andy Goldsworthy, Helen and Newton Harrison, Ichi Ikeda,
Richard Misrach, Nils-Udo, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Alan Sonfist
Guest Curators: John K. Grande (Canada) and Peter Selz (USA)
Curator: Pia Hovi-Assad
Lecture Wednesday, 02 February at 6.30 pm, “Nature is the Art of which We are Part” by John
K. Grande Curator Emeritus of Earth Art, Royal Botanical Gardens in Canada,
Pori Art Museum’s lecture hall, admission free
Preview for the media Thursday, 03 February, from 10 am to 12 pm
Artist and curator talk and tour Friday, 04 February, at 12.
Guest Curator John K. Grande, and artist Chris Drury will present the exhibition.
Admission free.
The opening of the exhibition will be on Friday, 04 February, at 6 pm.
Welcome!
The Eco-Art exhibition starts the 30th anniversary year of Pori Art Museum. It represents legendary American
pioneers in Land and Environmental Art, and contemporary artists from USA, Canada, Japan and Europe.
Many of these artists are showing their works for the first time in Finland. Eco-Art comprise of photographic
prints, drawings, videos, installations and wall paintings. Most of the photographic prints have been
produced locally to enable a reduced carbon footprint for the exhibition.
As the landscape and environment change on our planet for a number of reasons, artists’
engagement with these issues increasingly moves from a theoretical and conceptual bias to direct action
and process-oriented art, or alternatively an art that involved landscape integration as part of its vernacular.
The discourse on art and ecology has become important.
Eco-Art reinforces a new vision of art through the various artists’ presentations, an alternative to economies
of scale more like art in scale with nature, and ecological systems. As we can see from the beginnings of
Earth and Land Art, this art form is evolving. Increasingly ephemeral earth art attracts a truly global and
inter-cultural participation.
The Pori Art Museum has a long history of exhibitions and events that reveal a strong commitment to the
art/nature dialogue. Eco-Art is an effective show for its renders available to audiences the works of artists
from far away, and we can see the themes, the approaches, the interests all lead us back to nature, along a
trail that history and time can forget, but only briefly. Similar triggers and cues inspired even the early
modernist artists of the 20th century, but the economic vision was one of unassailable growth and
exploitation of resources. The economies we have built out of the natural world, and its correspondent
tautology of progress, are still reliant on resources just as they have always been. The dilemmas of
contemporary criticism are, in part the result of a failure to identify with the holistic basis of art, not only
in a visual, symbolic or conceptual way, but more importantly, in realizing that nature is the art of which
we are a part.
In co-operation with: Royal Botanical Gardens (Kanada), Galerie Lelong (USA), Electronic Arts Intermix
(USA)
More information: Pia Hovi-Assad, exhibition curator, tel. +358-02-621 1089, or +358-044-7011089