Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Olafur Eliasson, Your Curious Journey
Auckland Art Gallery
Until March 23, 2025
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Much of the work of the Danish / Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson focusses on issues around the impact of changing climate on our lives and our impacts on the environment. In his current exhibition “Your Curious Journey” at the Auckland Art Gallery the most obvious of his works which address these issues is “The Glacier Melt series 1999/2019”. In this series of 15 paired photographs the artist shows several; glaciers in Iceland ten years apart showing the extent of the glacier melt. The works are a clear visual documentation of the way in which warming temperatures are changing the nature of the environment. While they provide physical evidence of climate change they are also a metaphor for the issue and many of his other works are metaphorical or medications on the nature of the issues.
Eliasson is the Leonardo da Vinci of our times combining art and science with each of the disciplines informing the other providing observations and insights.
The title of the exhibition “Your Curious Journey” could be applied to the set of photographs as we witness the glaciers journeys of expansion and retraction, alerting us to the fact that climate change is part of the evolutionary journey of our past and future.
Linked to that work is one of the newer pieces, The Last Seven Days of Glacial Ice “(2024) where the progression of a melting block of ice over seven days has been rendered in bronze. The melted water has been captured in seven glass globes which are exhibited alongside the bronzes, The original block of ice is condensed to a shard of bronze and a globe of water but in reality the ice has disappeared, like some magic trick
While these and other works have a polemic quality to them, all his works are concerned with aspects of aesthetics -and scientific enquiry – light, structure, colour and movement. This mix of science and art can also be seen in “Double Spiral” where a long steel tube coils around itself creating a double helix in reference to the structure of DNA
One of the works which encapsulated all of these aspects is “Movement Microscope” (2011), a 16-minute video set in the artists studio / office in Berlin where the everyday activities of the staff become an elaborate dance routine and simple movements are elaborately observed. All the movements and interchanges are heighten by the inclusion of a group of “performers who move at a reduced pace, seemingly moving as though their recorded movements have been filmed at a slower speed.
We observe his designers and artists communicating ideas, working on designs, constructing works, sharing meals, their constructed works now on display in the gallery.
His largest work :”Under the Weather” hangs above the gallery atrium and appears to flicker and change as the observer moves beneath it. The images created are like weather patterns or brain scanner. The illusion of movement is created by an optical effect of two patterns similar to the auditory intersection of the Doppler Effect. Similar effects can be seen “Multiple Shadow House”.
One of the more impressive works is at the entrance to the show. “Yellow Corridor “is an version of a work the artist has created in m any locations, flooding an area with yellow light which effects our perceptions of colour and form. The almost blinding light of the lit corridor recalls the quote of Robert Oppenheimer who described the Atom Bomb as brighter than a thousand – which also links to Eliasson’s “The Weather Project” which featured a massive sun located in the Tate’s Turbine Hall.
Eliasson also plays with water and in “Beauty (1993), films of misty water, illuminated by projected light create a mini Aurora Australis and with “Object defined by activity (then) a fountain of water is rendered as an almost solid figure by the use of stroboscopic light.
“Still River” brings the issue of climate change down to a local level with three large cubes of ices, slowly melting in the gallery. The ice is frozen water taken form the Waikato River at Lake Whakamaru. We witness the ice melting, see the drops of water falling into the collection tray and hear the sound of the ice cracking and the water melting. We can also see in the water the residue contained in the water – the chemical, effluent and soil and other contaminants.
It provides a physical reminder of the process of the natural world and the ways they can be disrupted.
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