The University in the sky, Jan Kenneth Weckman, 2017

This pigment print belongs to the series of prints as part of Jan Kenneth Weckmans work within AmosLAB / The Art of Being University /, that included an exhibition and a seminar that was part of the 100-year jubilee program of Åbo Akademi University.

The Art of Being University takes the notion of diagram as its starting point, a kind of an image where spatial differences meet symbolic form, like texts and evolve together with more traditional pictorial subjects. The themes of the prints consider the university as (and in) an art format, a play, an adventure of research and visualization of metaphors for conditions of knowledge. A particular motif regards the university confronting future threats or reflect historical ideals, specifically with the help of the notion of palimpsest. Narratives are over- and re-written again and again during a period of 1000 years. This amounts to the original writing having vanished a long time ago, replaced by new ones. Something, though, might be visible of the layer’s underneath, if inspected thoroughly in spite the efforts to make them invisible.

Jan Kenneth Weckman (1946-) is a painter and a graphic artist living in Turku. He is also a doctor of fine art, and his doctoral thesis focuses on the semiotics of painting and modernism, especially introducing possibilities for applying Charles Sanders Peirce´s pragmatism describing the significative process within artistic praxis. The written part of the thesis has been published in Finnish, titled: Seitsemän maalauksen katsominen (Looking at seven paintings) / Maalaus mailman osana (Painting as Part of the World).