BIO
Erwin Laiho (b. 1995) is a sculptor grappling with the fundamental matter and deep time implications of digital media. The palette of his conceptual practice is the material lineage that connects raw minerals in the Earth’s crust to consumer technology and the global internet infrastructure. Treating devices and components as pure stocks of matter, Laiho refutes the narrative of a “wireless” everyday in favor of disentangling the muddy “wired” underside.
Though his studio looks like a computer chop shop, for Laiho the goal is not to destroy the objects’ image but rather to salvage an intrinsic worth from within. Disfiguring the “black boxes”, as most people relate to their devices, he strips them of their pristine state of consumerist desire and physical autonomy in order to reveal an immanent vitality of the raw materials. What’s left are incredibly refined mineral materials with a palpable potential and an unobstructed honesty to them - much like their predecessors under our feet and in the night skies.
As we reckon with global supply chains and depleting mineral resources critical to technology, Laiho’s works embody these commonly invisible non-human agents of change and set a stage for material performativity. Combining elements of Land Art and Institutional Critique, the artworks are disillusioned from the familiar ways of seeing our devices and subvert spatial expectations. At times the dead-pan misuse and -placement of familiar devices fringes on comedy — perhaps something akin to Wilson (from Cast Away) made by a cave dweller in a disconnected future.
In the long lineage technology as a vessel for immortality, Laiho’s artworks unpack and reflect how we all already co-create objects & binary memories that will outlast us.