Constellations

de Fergus Feehily, Johanna Vakkari

Constellations' is a book that came out of two preceding projects, both curated by Fergus Feehily - Professor of painting at the Academy of the Arts, Helsinki - at Exhibition Laboratory in the winter of 2017, the exhibition of the same name and 'Conversations in Light and Dark', a two-day conversation series. These projects featured artists and thinkers from all over the world, Alex Olson from Los Angeles, Terry Winters, from New York, the Japanese artist Yuki Okumura, Helsinki based artist Petri Ala-Maunus and Declan Long from Dublin, to mention just a few. Both projects featured significant involvement of students from the academy, as exhibitors, writers, participants in the conversations and curatorially. 0The book forms a collective art work, where the visual and written word form equal parts. 'Constellations' features texts by Declan Long, Fergus Feehily, Annie May Demozay, John Hutchinson and Kukka Paavilainen all dealing differently with ideas in and around painting. The section 'Correspondence', features pages given over to artists, writers and students of the academy. They were invited to respond to the idea of painting, these responses are varied, text, photographs, notebook pages, poetry and more.