Mänttä, Finland
Serlachius provides two very different perspectives on Keith Tyson’s “Universal Symphony” (on view through October 26, 2025). While the elevated observation point offers a sweeping overview, disclosing what appears to be a grab bag of objects, the proximity afforded on the gallery floor amends and contradicts that original impression. For me, Event Column (2024), a life-size replica of the iconic Morris column (the advertising cylinder associated with Paris) provided the breakthrough. Its posters, transmitting a semblance of the future in a 1950s style, hype Netflix, SpaceX, OnlyFans, and Instagram. The time shift is great fun, a bit Twilight Zone-ish, and as the gist sinks in, it demonstrates Tyson’s interest in perception, time and space, change, and what we can or cannot know. As an artist fascinated by science—he studied engineering before going to art school—he has a knack for accentuating paradoxes by injecting humor into scientific principles.
In 1991, Tyson initialized his Artmachine project, which employs a semi-computerized algorithm to synthesize instructions for creating endless artworks. The exhibition features several of its products, including the engrossing Artmachine Iteration no. 162: Long Chain Polymer (1997)—a very long string of black plastic balls playfully looped, in part, around pegs on a wall-mounted board, with the excess length crisscrossing the floor. What viewers don’t necessarily realize is that the installation keeps changing. Tyson, per Artmachine’s directions, no doubt, reconfigures the chain for every exhibition.
Other puzzling pieces include Geno Pheno Sculpture: Covert Polyhedron (2005), which focuses on the simultaneity of imperceptible and perceptible traits, and Being and Nothingness (2025), which mimics the look and size of a gallery information plate. The details on the latter note “Being and Nothingness, mixed media,” as well as this expression of time: “> ∞ B.C.— ∞ A.D. <.” Imagine that expression delineates the span of human life on earth plus everything before and after its existence—a provocative, if not altogether implausible, demand.
Tyson’s penchant for considering everything also materializes in a little stainless-steel cube. The endearing Everything (2024), which measures only 75 cubic centimeters, exhibits a host of multicolored displays and emits sporadic beeps. The electronics, monitors, and sensors packed within, according to its label, constitute “an interface between its inner and outer reality, much like we humans project a certain self-image to the outside world.” Despite its small size, Everything recalls Tyson’s colossal Large Field Array (2005–07), a point of reference for “Universal Symphony.” Consisting of nearly 300 cube-based sculptures set out on a grid that stretches across the floor and all four walls to surround the viewer, Large Field Array has been situated since 2016 in a 25-square-meter, purpose-built exhibition space at the Zabludowicz Collection on Finland’s Sarvisalo Island. Its proximity inspired the idea for this exhibition at Serlachius.
Since “Universal Symphony” spans nearly 35 years of Tyson’s production, one might suppose it was intended as a retrospective, but that isn’t the case. The curators wanted to highlight where Tyson’s work might be going, and so half of the featured works were made during the 2020s. The most recent propose his interests in natural features and processes, juxtapositions of time and space, and their metaphors. The dynamic bronze form of Scholar’s Stone (2023), installed on the grounds outside, replicates and greatly magnifies an example of the fantastical, naturally occurring stones known as gongshi in China. Dark Sundial (2024), in contrast, is a precision instrument. Its lifelike arms are poised, as if holding an invisible pool cue, to focus on Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
Back inside, 16 Cubic Meters of Ocean (Atlantic) (2024) seems to capture and hold rippling water as a shiny, black mass, recalling Contact (2019) by the Japanese art collective Mé. But where Contact occupies a confined space and provides only a single perspective, Tyson’s large cuboid appears as a freestanding block cut cleanly out of the ocean. Since it occupies the middle of the gallery, viewers can circumnavigate it. Moreover, by standing the horizontal surface of the water upright (shifting it 90 degrees), Tyson offers a visceral confrontation with the silent power of that rippled energy—now a strange kind of wall. Through such transpositions and counterintuitive encounters, his works generate a new worldview.
