Ongoing & Upcoming
2024 |
Aug-Nov, solo show, Gaa Gallery, Cologne, DE
Oct-Dec, duo show, Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn, EE Nov, duo presentation, Andra Festa at Art021, Shanghai, CN Dec, solo presentation, Gaa Gallery at NADA, Miami, FL, US |
2025 |
Apr, residency, La Bibi, Palma, ES Apr-May, solo show, La Bibi, Palma, ES |
Lacrimal Lake House
solo show
Gaa Gallery
Cologne, Germany
30.8.–2.11.2024
text by Jaakko Rintala
photography by Yvo Cho & Eetu Sihvonen
Lacrimal Lake House is an exploration into themes and motifs that are recognizable from Eetu Sihvonen’s previous work. Their work, as a whole, is an exercise in world-building, or perhaps more pertinently, exploration. As such, it opens a vast landscape, a topography if you will, of somewhere that is at once familiar and estranging. Certain topoi, such as the egg and the burnt ornamental furniture, are recurrent in Sihvonen’s work, yet the world that opens up is of a distant nature, as if covered by a soft veil that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to locate yourself in it, hence the estrangement.
This estranging quality can be connected to melancholy, a state in which the subject continues living in surroundings that are at once familiar but somehow altered, as if in ruins. Melancholy and ruination permeate the exhibition’s works, from the pale bluish purple/violet of the resin works to black char of the carved wood. Accordingly, this is the situation the viewer then finds themselves in, exploring an emotional landscape imbued with melancholy and pebbled with ruins.
However, there is also a sense of regeneration, present most germanely in the figure of the egg as well as the “salient dew drops”, tears, which ties into the name of the exhibition. In human anatomy, the lacrimal lake is where tears gather, and it is located in-between the eye and the eyelid. Both the egg and the lacrimal lake thus refer to resting, gestating, gathering strength, a state before hatching. Clarice Lispector writes: “The egg is a suspended thing. It has never landed. When it lands, it is not what has landed.” In a similar fashion, a tear is a suspended thing.
According to Gilles Deleuze the artwork presents to the viewer sensation which is experienced only by entering the artwork, and it is then felt in the body produced by the artwork. In this sense, the exhibition can be seen as a sort of a role-playing game wherein the viewer traverses the emotional landscape as a wanderer on a journey upon an unknown path, encountering different objects and characters.
One of these objects in the exhibition is a renginkaappi, a farmhand’s cabinet, which underscores the transient nature of this journey. Historically this cabinet was intended to hold all of the farmhand’s personal belongings for they knew not when they would be assigned to a new farm and would then have to uproot and locate to their new lodgings, carrying the cabinet on their back. A situation somewhat relatable to most, as explicated in the title of the 2002 album of the Finnish psychedelic folk artist Kuusumun Profeetta: Kukin kaappiaan selässään kantaa, directly translated as Each Carries a Cabinet on Their Back
Chimeclad Spire of the Shelled Echoes, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
210 x 70 x 40 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
210 x 70 x 40 cm
Have You Come to Be One With the Dew Drops? 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
70 x 20 x 25 cm
Constant of the Sacred Saline Dew Drops, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, acrylic paint, hardware
85 x 45 x 30 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, acrylic paint, hardware
85 x 45 x 30 cm
Everflow, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
178x110x10 cm
The Weeping Descent, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
90 x 30 x 30 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
90 x 30 x 30 cm
Dewkissers, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
60 x 40 x 8 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
60 x 40 x 8 cm
Slumbering Warden, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
60 x 20 x 25 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
60 x 20 x 25 cm
I Can’t Stay for Long, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
178x110x10 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
178x110x10 cm
The Sacred Drops... I mustn’t let them weep, 2024
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
55 x 20 x 25 cm
Charred pinewood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye, hardware
55 x 20 x 25 cm
Sacred Saline Dew Drops
and Other High Jinks
Solstice Festival
Ruka, Finland
June 2024
7-part sculpture installation
Charred pine wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
Photography by Eetu Sihvonen, Felix Bardy, Dennis Konoi, Samuli Vienola
Ruka, Finland
June 2024
7-part sculpture installation
Charred pine wood, 3D printed soy-based resin, linseed oil, dye
Photography by Eetu Sihvonen, Felix Bardy, Dennis Konoi, Samuli Vienola
Log 1 �’s 74th Birthday Party
Featuring work by Eetu Sihvonen, Ilê Sartuzi & Arieh Frosh
Installation by Amelie Mckee and Melle Nieling
Plicnik Space Iniative
London, United Kingdom
6.4.–2.6.2024
The events in LOG 1 through 3 are based on the experiences of an unknown form, following the traces of a lost entity through spacetime, profiling its trajectory in the process. It has reconstructed this moment within its limited ability, piecing together fragments to form a whole.
Treasure Hiding, 2024
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye
For T, 2024
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye
35x27x5cm
Oak wood, 3D printed resin, linseed oil, dye
Dearworths
Dayrim (Dearworth Duo) II, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
32x23x10cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
32x23x10cm
Dayrim (Dearworth Duo) I, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
Dayred II, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
Dayred I, 2023
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
37x20x16cm
Chime Flail, Bellow Shell
, 2024
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
103x30x22cm
wood, linseed oil, resin, dye
103x30x22cm
Gileyspeke
Gileyspeke, 2023
Oak wood, beeswax, soy-based resin
9x7x4cm
Gileyspeke II, 2023
Oak wood, beeswax, soy-based resin, oil pastel
25x18x3,5cm
Gileyspeke III, 2023
Oak wood, beeswax, soy-based resin, oil pastel
25x18x3,5cm