Natalie Rae Good, Allyson Packer, Kate Ruck, and Inkeri Virtanen

January 16-18 2025 at Vapaan Taiteen Tila

Opening Thursday, January 16, 18-21h

Open hours Friday, January 17, 12-18h and Saturday January 18, 12-16h

There is a distinct relentlessness to the current moment. Churning news cycles, erratic microtrends, and the cacophony of our own echo chambers all point to a culture out of sync with the cycles of the human body and the planet we inhabit. The artists represented in this exhibition operate within this incongruity. They examine the speed and abstraction of contemporary culture through perspectives informed by their experiences practicing in remote geographic locations. With collaborative origins in the New Mexico Meslands and the Helsinki archipelago, they apply essential embodied knowledge from extreme environments to scrutinize a contemporary global culture that too often suppresses the human hand. Working across digital, analog, and traditional craft media, their artwork asserts an immutable physicality, bringing concrete form to the diffuse target of an accelerating, dematerializing culture.

Natalie Rae Good’s work in print and sculpture to map and record time and its passage. Through a process rooted in craft, she translates earthly cycles, wind, and memory into tangible forms, exploring the compulsion to assert power over the natural world.

Kate Ruck creates virtual objects that she transmutes into seemingly ancient forms. Combining digital fabrication and traditional sculptural processes, her beguilingly anachronistic references a whole history of human making.

Allyson Packer’s work transforms appropriated imagery into mesmerizing refractions of our visual culture. Visceral and incantatory, her videos and installations suggest the presence of unknown expanses residing in the ways our minds and bodies interface with a rapidly advancing world.

Inkeri Virtanen’s practice makes visible the subtle forces of energy that influence human experience. Her practice exists in the threshold between oil painting and weaving. With a meticulous hand, she imbues her enigmatic images with a heightened significance that alludes to deeper meanings

Together, their work suggests that there is new meaning to be uncovered through a connection to the physical world. Through the warmth of human touch, the shiver of somatic connection, and the profound weight of sculptural materials, they reframe the particularities of contemporary life. Neither returning to old forms, nor fully embracing dematerialized ones, their work builds new and tangible connections with the world, allowing us to see it more clearly.