NOON Projects is honored to present "Fever Dream" by Finnish artist Hertta Kiiski. In her second exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles, Kiiski presents a constellation of sculptural works, photographic assemblages, and the premiere of two new films. The installation evokes a gentle collapse—quiet, recursive, and strangely tender. It unfolds as a soft hallucination, tracing the slow erosion of form, the porous boundaries between species, and the unexpected warmth found at the end of things. "Fever Dream" moves like a lucid dream—nonlinear, looping, and without hierarchy—where softness replaces spectacle at the edge of collapse. At the core of the exhibition, two new video works unfold Kiiski’s ongoing inquiry into ecological poetics, and the entangled mythologies of embodiment and environment. "Nox Rosae" is atmospheric and sensorially charged. Structured at 17 minutes—the average duration of a REM sleep cycle—the film resists conventional narrative, offering instead a drifting, affective experience that mimics the fluidity and disorientation of dreaming. Created collaboratively by Hertta Kiiski and visual artist Janne Punkari, the work builds on their shared interest in poetic form, symbolic objects, and spatial ambiguity. At its center is a rose, one of humanity’s most universal metaphors for love and natural beauty—yet also a symbol of human control: cultivated, hybridized, and rigorously manicured. In the film, a mummified tin rose becomes an unlikely protagonist, moving through textured spaces where material and meaning blur. The sound, composed by Anniina Saksa, acts as the film’s ambient nervous system—her audio-textures framing silence as much as sound, teasing memory, and heightening sensation. In "Not not a metaphor," Kiiski doesn’t dramatize collapse but tunes into its frequencies. The film unfolds like a long exhale—soft, slow, and saturated with the minor chords of grief, wonder, absurdity, and care. Its narrator, a carrion crow—part oracle, part sidewalk prophet—riffs: “You want salvation, but also takeout. You want tenderness, but flinch at the bite. You want to save the dolphins, but you still fly. And yet. You love.” What do we do with ourselves now that we are no longer at the center? Filmed across zoos, aquariums, ancient ruins, and distribution centers, a monkey sits still—indifferent and alert. The artist’s daughters, long-time collaborators, appear as jesters without an audience, drifting through a glowing warehouse. Kiiski offers neither symbols nor solutions but casts out echoes suspended in a fluid, flickering ecosystem. Surrounding the films, Kiiski’s sculptures are made from found, used, and inherited materials—ceramic dolphins, home decor, shoelaces, and wilted painted flowers—objects pre-charged with the residue of personal histories, consumer cycles, and cultural kitsch. Rather than purify or explain, Kiiski allows these materials to remain in their in-betweenness: awkward, sentimental, and animate. The works explore an aesthetic that sits at the crossroads of crumbling modern civilization and its detritus. Kiiski’s readymades become emblematic: Maslow's triangle, the mug as a vessel of comfort, the dolphin as a symbol of intelligence, play, and captivity. On the back wall are two photographic assemblages, presented in ultramarine blue frames. Created with a printed passe-partout, each contains four images arranged like holiday snapshots, hung on the wall like a family heirloom. "Fever Dream" does not present any manifestos; instead, it creates a space—and a suggestion—to pay close attention to the contradictions we live inside. Kiiski presents a landscape shaped by entropy: the slow undoing of categories, systems, and species. Civilization doesn’t end with drama. It frays. It leaks. It dreams. Hertta Kiiski (b. 1973, Turku, Finland) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work unfolds within a framework of love, embracing the magical, mythical, and esoteric. Working across photography, film, installation, textiles, and spatial interventions, Kiiski constructs environments that dissolve the boundaries between the natural and the constructed, the everyday and the imaginary. Her work is rooted in collaboration—over the past 13 years, with her daughters, as well as other artist partners, dogs, and more-than-human companions—foregrounding interspecies communication and feminist modes of world-building. Her practice draws on ecology, posthumanist theory, and the unruly textures of lived experience. Her solo and group exhibitions have been presented at major institutions internationally, including the 14th Gwangju Biennale (Korea), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), the Finnish Museum of Photography, Photographic Centre Peri (Finland), Hafnarfjörður Museum (Iceland), the Icelandic Photo Festival, and NOON Projects (Los Angeles). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Finnish National Gallery / Kiasma, the Finnish Museum of Photography, and the Turku Art Museum. Kiiski has published three acclaimed photobooks—"Archive Play" (2014), "I Was an Apple and I Got Peeled" (2016), and "Otherworld" (Kehrer Verlag, 2023)—each further developing her interest in the intersection of photographic storytelling, dream logic, and spatial practice. In addition to her studio practice, she is an educator and is active in several artist-run initiatives. She lives and works in Turku, Finland. Opening Reception: Friday, August 1, 2025, 6–8 PM August Gallery Hours: Thursdays & Fridays: 7–10 PM Saturdays: 12–5 PM For further information, please contact info@noon-projects.com or +1 971 341 6648.