In The White Room
Installation-sculpture exhibited in the Finnish Artists’ Association Annual Exhibition, Helsinki Art Hall, 1989, The Babyretrospective, Pori Art Museum, 1990, The Babyretrospective, Turku Art Museum, 1990, Summer Exhibition, Wäinö Aaltonen Art Museum, Turku, 2016
The installation-sculpture is a tribute to the safety space of Andersson’s childhood; the white painted room in a summer cottage, filled with clear midsummer light, in the archipelago outside Turku. Andersson’s family moved out to this place when the school finished the first of June and moved back to the city when the school started again three moths later. In this room problems filling the young boy’s mind, were scaled down listening to the blooming of 1960ties pop music from a small Philips portable record player with his friends. The space, the nature and perhaps most of all the music functioned as a safety place for the young boy, releasing the tensions, created by sever stuttering, which made his winters in the school into a void filled with Angst.
The Cream was one of the bands he listened to and the title of the work comes from the song with the same name. On the white side of the sculpture, miniature paintings depict pop songs from late 1960ties. On one part of the structure, in the centre of a cross, a self portrait of Andersson can be seen. But physical walls cannot function as psychological walls, so that is why the walls in the work are transparent. They are penetrated by objects – a guitar, a microphone, a heart with cigarettes – floating in the air crushing the invisible walls, the psychological barrier hindering the young boy from reaching out in the world. But the summer always ended and the move back to the city threw a dark shadow on the outside of the room, but the memories and the knowledge of the next summer coming, kept the young boy alive.
The work is built from a myriad of materials and objects. It is from the period in the 1980ties when Andersson used all kinds of “normal” materials and objects used in the society, with the intent that art could function as a alchemical process turning crap into gold.
During the exhibition in the Wäinö Aaltonen Art Museum (WAM) in Turku, 2016, the museum produced a Spotify song list with the songs depicted in the installation. The audience could access it by a Q code on the wall.(Can also be accessed from a picture on this web site).
A digitized version of an 8mm movie, showing the process of making the work, made by Krister Lindberg in 1991, was also on display on a monitor close to the installation-sculpture. Music in the film is by Ari Ainasoja.