The works assembled in the exhibition evidence Lahde’s long-term involvement and expert handling of pattern making. In this regard, Tool for Making (2014) offers a key to her overall production. A grid mat traditionally reserved for cutting out templates occupies the vertical plane of the wall, staging a scene that evokes the artist’s worktable. On this substrate, Lahde has affixed a sequence of repeating vellum parallelograms that are hinged together and stacked such that their arrangement creates the illusion of a translucent vertical column. From this simple design, she generates something of the order of architecture.
In all her work, Lahde arrives at the elegance of her solutions not as the result of detailed theoretical computation but rather out of the complex embodied knowledge she has intuited from hands-on figuration. Her forms are precisely conceived and meticulously constructed. Her drive to exactitude creates comprehensive systems that confirm our experience as beings tethered to finite measures of time and space. Since infinity is beyond comprehension and its limitlessness in disaccord with what we can know, we may find particular satisfaction in the boundaries of Lahde’s forms, their resolve. Her artworks rigidly adhere to the known, the specific and the measurable, in contrast to the possibility of indeterminacy and endlessness. All lines in the exhibition come to a terminus, reinforcing our sense of finitude.
Kristiina Lahde is from Toronto and received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 1999. She was a long list nominee for the Sobey Art Award in 2013, and has been featured on the covers of C Magazine (Spring 2013) and ARC POETRY MAGAZINE (Winter 2014). Lahde is the recipient of numerous grants, recently a TAC and an OAC Mid-Career grant. Her work is in the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank and has been exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto, La Biennale de Montréal, and La Taller, Bilbao, Spain, with an upcoming exhibition at OBORO in Montréal. Lahde is represented by MKG127, Toronto.
Sarah Robayo Sheridan is an independent writer and curator specialized in the dissemination of contemporary art. She has worked in non-profit galleries, museums and festivals, and taught curatorial studies at the University of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in magazines, anthologies and artists’ monographs, and her independent research has received recognition from the Canada Council for the Arts. She holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts.
Design: Tony Hewer | Editing: Shannon Anderson
Digital publication to the exhibition Kristiina Lahde: ULTRA-PARALLEL
Presented by the Koffler Gallery | January 22 to March 29, 2015 | Curator: Mona Flip
© Koffler Centre of the Arts, 2015, in collaboration with the individual contributors. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-928175-04-9.