A FEW hours north of Helsinki, Finland, on the shores of a lake, sits an art museum, opened in the 1930s and much expanded since. Now one of its galleries is filled with 200 years鈥� worth of artistic visions of the skies, the work of Helena Sederholm, an art-education professor, and science writer Markus Hotakainen.
Scientific approaches to the cosmos are affectionately parodied in 鈥� a breeding project to adapt fruit flies for life on Titan, Saturn鈥檚 largest moon 鈥� and , which tries to realise, NASA-style, English bishop Francis Godwin鈥檚 story The Man in the Moone, whose hero flies to the moon in a chariot towed by 鈥渕oon geese鈥�.
Reductive approaches to the cosmos reach pathological levels in Marko Vuokola鈥檚 Been There, Seen It, Done That, in which the phases of the moon are reduced to a pattern of shadows cast by glass discs resting on a glass shelf.
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A more elegaic exploration of the same idea (that we murder to dissect) lies in . After a few minutes, the viewer鈥檚 dark-adapted eye makes out a beautiful and convincing cloud of stars. At regular intervals, lights come on, revealing the cloud for what it is: smeared, worn Perspex sheets stuck with scraps of Post-it note and scrawled over with whiteboard pens: 鈥淵es鈥�; 鈥淣o鈥�; 鈥淣o life field鈥�. The night sky is reduced to a bitterly precise, tiresome, anthropocentric hunt for an earthlike planet.
The lights go out. The magic reasserts itself. To comprehend the world, we must reduce it. But as Penelope Umbrico ably reveals in , the world is big enough to take our abuse. And in the moonlit landscapes by 19th-century artists Fanny Churberg and Hjalmar Munsterhjelm, it swallows us whole.
The Starry Skies of Art, Serlachius Museums, M盲ntt盲, Finland, to 8 January 2017
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淣orthern lights鈥�
