Mix-tape: Kristiina Lahde refreshes centimetres and inches with her wonderful work

Kristiina Lahde’s work is preoccupied with measurement, regulation, and the possibilities for boundary-breaking that such systems present. Using material that traditionally provides and facilitates order, like measuring tapes, phone books, and rulers, the Canadian artist produces graphic works and sculptures that reconsider their original function and refresh them as something new and extraordinary. Her Beyond Measure series of works examines the role of measurement in our day-to-day lives; in the Metric system pieces, she takes one mode of structuring and regulating physical reality (inches and centimetres) and reconfigures them as abstracted cubes that nevertheless retain a sense of uniformity and consistency. Her 2009 bookwork, Compilation, meanwhile appears to play on the hive of information currently available to us, and perhaps ties the intentional graphic consistency of something as humdrum as a telephone book with the startlingly beautiful consistency of natural geometric forms. Wow.