Michael Blaser’s artistic concerns centre on the unspectacular, the trivial and familiar and, consequently, the oftentimes overlooked. At the Aargauer Kunsthaus the artist presents a selection from his 2007 – 2010 photo series Mittelland. Himself raised in the agglomeration, he examines the peculiarities of the urban periphery on long photographic forays, focusing on the Swiss Plateau, a densely populated metropolitan area bordered geographically by the Jura Mountains and the Alps. The artist confronts us with a Switzerland of mediocrity that oscillates between urban identity and provincial character, city and countryside, nature and urban sprawl, public and private space.

Michael Blaser’s photographs can be considered both landscape and architectural images. Although the residents are absent from the images, we sense their presence behind the austere facades. In the interchangeable functional architecture where form follows function and in the meticulously trimmed lawns, neat balcony plantings, standardised trash containers and parking spaces in front of single and multi-family houses human traces can be discerned. The domesticated landscapes with their infrastructures are unadorned mirror images of our society.

In his CARAVAN exhibition Michael Blaser combines the photographic series Mittelland with his video work Plane im Wind (2012). The latter visualises the random poetry of the everyday. Shot at a construction site near Aarau, the carefree lightness projected by the moving images offers a formal and thematic contrast to the conceptual and formally rigorous photo piece.