A/dornment - Curating Contemporary Art Jewelry is pleased to present the creative production made by a group of artists and designers called Hatara Project at the Milan Desgn Week, inside of the exhibition IRONICALLY ICONIC - Unexpected design for expected uses.
The exhibition is organized by Valorizzazioni Culturali | Art-Events and AtemporaryStudio and it will take place from 4 to 9 April at Brera Site, in the heart of Milan. An exhibition in which the most sophisticated production and creative techniques wear original forms, sometimes weird and funny, that ironically represent modern customs and traditions. Formal icons and everyday objects, apparently conventional, reveal themselves in the wonder and surprise of the unexpected. Not a mere formal game but rather the result of a reflection on the unconventional use of objects, materials, decoration that offers the opportunity to gain an insight and unprecedented cross-over design.
Beyond any temporal and geographic boundaries.
Hatara Project started in 2015 as a collaboration between Annea Lounatvuori and Christine Jalio. The name Hatara, from the Finnish hattara – cotton candy – describes something dreamy, sweet and concrete but eventually fragile.
Hatara is a meeting point between jewelry artists that have different backgrounds and come from different countries and that merge common paths of research. It’s a connection, an exchange of culture, an experience and knowledge. Now they are 14 women from Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Germany, Japan, France, Australia and The Netherlands.
They all somehow love to play with the two themes of the exhibition, Irony and Iconicity, focusing on different and experimental topics like the body, unconventional materials, optical and tactile illusion, ordinary and extraordinary, stereotypes and originality.
Anke Huben, for example, studies the body as carrier of jewelry and takes her personal obsessions and insecurities as the starting point; Annea Lounatvuori transforms her childhood to creativity comparing and combining the recycled and found objects from nature; Christine Jalio is fascinated by old and worn elements and gets excited about roughness, concrete and decay. She questions the stereotypes of aesthetics and finds beauty in places where others may not see it; Elin Flognman questions our desires to escape everyday life by finding the point of intersection between the mundane and the extraordinary and by listening to the objects of the everyday she wants to make everyday matters.
Ginta Zabarovska gave homage to the ‘Home’ as most important place for everyone life. Home collection started some years ago when she was away from home and realized it is one of the most important places. Helmi Lindblom ́s work is a powerful dialogue between different tactile surfaces and colors. Those surfaces and colors create a playful body that titillates the eye but speaks directly to fingertips. Marine Dominiczak loves to question the human being and the perception of its body inside the society, with an approach near to the one of the anthropologist.
Jelizaveta Suska aims to create her own new world and languages playing with material illusions. She crafts her works so that if she were to become tiny and drop onto her jewelry, she would see a marvelous landscape. Melina Lindroos is a calm searcher and enjoyer of time. Her ways of working are studious, often including long and slow processes; in this collection she composes an organic shape with a surface of frequent line as in a calm and quiet process with a lot of repetitive movements. Sara Malm based her research on three materials: wood, metal and leather. They carry different qualities that she feels comfortable with.
Susanna Yläranta investigates materials and shapes in a more philosophical and conceptual way, linking it with our profound need to count, arrange and control time. Wiebke Pandikow is able to play with plastic bags which symbolize mindless consumerism and a throw-away society creating from them something beautiful and drawing attention to what we usually discard without second thought.
Yasuyo Hida approaches the work through material experimentation. Starting by manipulating unorthodox components, in this case balloons, allows the unexpected to develop and follows a path of discovery toward a new vocabulary of contemporary aesthetics.
A/DORNMENT @ IRONICALLY ICONIC - UNEXPECTED DESIGN FOR EXPECTED USES BRERA SITE via delle Erbe 2A - Milano Brera District April 4th - 9th, 10 am - 8 pm
Marine Dominiczak, Elin Flognman, Yasuyo Hida, Anke Huyben, Christine Jalio, Helmi Lindblom, Melina Lindroos, Annea Lounatvuori, Sara Malm, Wiebke Pandikow, Jelizaveta Suska, Susanna Yläranta, Ginta Zabarovska