Eija-Liisa Ahtila presents a major new solo exhibition with her third commissioned work for Serlachius with Reflection of a Forest. An 8-channel synchronised video and audio installation.
Finland’s most renowned contemporary artist, Eija Liisa Ahtila, a pioneer of video art, continues with her narrative on the environment and its role in our lives and subsequently ours in it. Filmed over three years in the south of her beautiful country, the piece investigates the spatial nature of the forest and its role. Without a traditional narrative to follow, it can be hard not to get drawn into the magnificent cinematography and huge vistas projected across the largest exhibition space at the museum.
Projects manager at ArtAV, Simon Weightman, worked alongside Eija Liisa Ahtila’s producer, Ilppo Pohjola, to ensure the artistic vision was met and surpassed. With huge 7m plus wide images in landscape and portrait, and projected images that ran on top of each other, the ability to remote shutter projectors that were bright enough for the image size was paramount. With this in mind, ArtAV worked with their suppliers and was able to obtain some of the first Epson PQ range of projectors in Europe. With 16,000 lumens and UHD resolutions, as well as lens flexibility, the Epson EB-PQ2216B projector provided the professional image quality required. The native 16x9 chip meant there was no projected raster to mask off, and the remote shutter meant that when a projector was no longer showing an image, it could be shuttered from using the playback software. In regards to the playback software, the artist required 8 UHD videos to play in sync and with the capability to remotely shutter the projectors individually. Pixera two Quad Gen.2 media servers met this requirement head-on. Two units were slaved together to ensure the appropriate outputs were available, and with Pixera’s timeline, ArtAV programmers were able to key-frame in the required shutter moments. The artistic team were keen for this to be as quick as possible to avoid there being any projected black shown at all. This resulted in the projectors being shuttered in 1/50 of a second.
With the main exhibition space at Serlachius being so large, controlling the audio with little physical acoustic treatment was always going to be a challenge. Fohhn Audio’s line array column speakers, the LX-100 and LX-150, were used to assist with limiting the vertical spread of the audio whilst still allowing a decent horizontal dispersion to cover the huge 21m wide projected image. Whilst the majority of the piece's audio is ambient and atmospheric, there is a section of vocals to allow that to be more distinct and delivered to the audience as clearly as possible. Some Fohhn point source speakers were used as dedicated vocal speakers. The warmth and clarity from them elevated the spoken word of the piece without distorting it.
Overall, the artist and museum were overjoyed at the final exhibition results, and ArtAV are proud to have added Finland and Serlachius to the list of international accomplishments. We very much look forward to working with Eija-Liisa Ahtila again.
