02 Second Skin
03 Bearded Virgin
04 Insect Collection
05 Dialogue
07 Borderlne
08 Reformatory
09 Bodyspace
10 Dialectics of the Surface
12 Pyromania
13 Anti-dualistic Dualism
14 Neon-forest
15 various works
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| DIALOGUE, 2005. Car tyres, hair, stainless steel, Ø 43 cm, height 300 cm. Collection of Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art. | |
One of the starting points of Timo Heino's art is the juxtaposition of different oppositions. The visual parallelisms of his works form a tense field of force, in which various pairs of concepts such as hard and soft, smooth and porous, synthetic and organic, get the measure of each other. In the work Dialogue (2004-05), Heino has paralleled long, blond hair with black car tires. The hair, provided by a wholesaler in London, originates in Asia, and it is thus a product of the global market economy, which has tuned various parts of the human body in commodities, too. The dialogue between nature and culture, presented in some of Heino's earlier works, has this time an ironic note, for it may be difficult to decide which one of the two is more 'natural;' worn-out tyre or industrially bleached hair. The parallelism involves a conscious play with clichés, because the combination brings to mind girlie calendars hanging on the walls of garages as well as the fetishism connected with black rubber and blond hair. One can also see a certain kinship between these works and David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), a film based on the novel by J. G. Ballard, concerning the peculiar sexual relationship between human beings and cars, flesh and machinery.
(c)Marja Jalava