THE COMFORT ZONE
The Comfort Zone is a mixed-media installation by Oval Office (Jaakko Pallasvuo and Mikko Gaestel), presented as part of the duo’s investigation into lifestyle, desire, and the aesthetics of managed existence.
The installation comprises a constellation of objects — a globe printed on polyester, a water cooler loaded with paracetamol and codeine, printed vertical blinds, archival photographs, and a short HD video — each drawn from the visual language of corporate wellness, domestic comfort, and ambient pharmaceutical culture. Together they form a portrait of a certain kind of contemporary life: optimised, soothed, mildly anesthetised.
Exhibited at Future Gallery, Berlin.
Future Gallery Berlin
“Future Gallery is proud to present the debut solo exhibition by artist duo Oval Office (Gaestel / Pallasvuo). Oval Office is a collaborative project by Jaakko Pallasvuo (1987, FI) and Mikko Gaestel (1982, DE/FI). The project focuses on the behavior patterns of a future middle class. OO presents its findings in the form of video and photography.”
⚭ (pronounced OVAL OFFICE) is a project by MIKKO GAESTEL and JAAKKO PALLASVUO, both individual artists in their own right. For their debut solo exhibition at Future Gallery in Berlin, they are showing an experimental approach, with works structured loosely around everyday rituals or cast from the curious ephemera collected from personal experiences. The whole is presented in the form of video and photography, equally pervaded by surreality, eeriness and absurdity.
Their work reminds me of what PAUL VIRILIO calls ‘Picnolepsy‘, a medical condition that, nonetheless, tells us about perception and time:
Suddenly, before me, new objects appeared, bizarre figures cut out, notched, a set of articulations has become suddenly visible and these observed objects were no longer banal, whatever, insignificant; they were on the contrary, diversified in the extreme. They were everywhere, all space, all the world was filled with new forms. They were nested in the hollows of the least forms. It was like an unknown vegetation that grew around me. Industrial objects without value provoked the appearance of objects temporarily given a great complexity. The position of things triggered new exotic forms, forms that escaped us despite their evidence. Accustomed as we are to trivial geometries, we perceive perfectly the circle, the sphere, the cube or the square, we perceive infinitely less well intervals, the interstices between things, between people. – PAUL VIRILIO, L’Horizon Négatif
WeFindWilderness