2023
“Look up. Look up in the sky” is an art project comprising the same titled 3D animation VR artwork and mixed media room installation by artist Kristen Rästas.
The displayed works took their first shape during the time the world just started to open up again. Due to this, they address a certain spatial-spiritual self-location as well as the need for freedom for personal development. The digital sphere can offer an essential room to be, communicate and express, yet it carries a dystopian atmosphere in itself. In the moment the human kind destroys the planet’s assets, these spaces will be our only realm of daily escapism. Rästas unfolds his immersive experience within these tensions and asks multilayered questions regarding the reality we are living in, our past and future.
The exhibition reflects on such ambiguous times and questions as if these feelings are now forever lost or just locked in the back of our minds and demands to broaden our perspective by looking deep into our emotional structures. The artworks, in one or another way, all reflect on landscape motifs, in which it is questionable how true to life or how artificial they are. These are in constant search of a digital salvation, of a safe place away from the dangers of the physical world. This exhibition is a journey to self-discovery, coming out of a dark winter, escaping a collective trauma and crisis. It places the viewer onto an open ambient field that symbolises times of innocence. This pictorially is a glimpse of childhood or from other times when it felt like we were more at ease with ourselves and our surroundings.
The fragmented room installation, together with the virtual reality centrepiece, form a poetic whole, in which the artist tells a fictive narrative of self-exploration and the need for daydreaming in order to offer oneself a peace of mind.
Sound production by Mataya Waldenberg
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media in the program NEUSTART KULTUR Module D – Digital Mediation Formats
Supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia
Artist’s gratitude to roam team, Kelli Gedvil, Ian-Simon Märjama, Kennet Lekko, Martin Viidik, James Hilsdon
