Leicester Metro
Art
Minna Kantonen
Currently London-based, Finnish artist Minna Kantonen has a fascination with overlooked aspects of contemporary life. Her City gallery Offsite exhibition focuses on a series called The Line of Height, in which she gathered office workers and arranged them in order of height. It's a simple idea that produces unexpectedly fascinating results.
Quite apart from the straightforward intrigue of glimpsing strangers' workplaces or contemplating the clues about their character, Kantonen's images also slyly overturn the order of things. In choosing a random factor such as height, she draws attention to other, perhaps equally random, ordering principles in the workplace.
Taking offices that are usually arranged by carefully defended subtleties of income or status and lining them up by height alone we have no idea whether it's the part-time clerk or company director in the first or last place.
By insisting that only the visual arrangement by height matters, all the other distinctions her method ignores become noticable.
Consequently, they seem just as arbitrary as the one that she chooses to emphasise.
Wayne Burrows
Art
Minna Kantonen
Currently London-based, Finnish artist Minna Kantonen has a fascination with overlooked aspects of contemporary life. Her City gallery Offsite exhibition focuses on a series called The Line of Height, in which she gathered office workers and arranged them in order of height. It's a simple idea that produces unexpectedly fascinating results.
Quite apart from the straightforward intrigue of glimpsing strangers' workplaces or contemplating the clues about their character, Kantonen's images also slyly overturn the order of things. In choosing a random factor such as height, she draws attention to other, perhaps equally random, ordering principles in the workplace.
Taking offices that are usually arranged by carefully defended subtleties of income or status and lining them up by height alone we have no idea whether it's the part-time clerk or company director in the first or last place.
By insisting that only the visual arrangement by height matters, all the other distinctions her method ignores become noticable.
Consequently, they seem just as arbitrary as the one that she chooses to emphasise.
Wayne Burrows