Sunday Entry: Pertti Kekarainen

Photographer Pertti Kekarainen, along with Aino Kannisto, Ville Lenkkeri, and Elina Brotherus is another gifted artist to belong to the Helsinki School of Art in Finland. He was born in 1965 and continues to explore the concepts that he developed while in graduate school. Kekarainen originally studied both sculpture and painting, and began applying his skill in those areas to photography in 1993. His series of interiors entitled, "Tila" deals with the idea of space, three-dimensionality, and focus. While these images are devoid of people, centering instead on interiors and perspective, another recent series, which bares the same title, "Tila" depicts figures moving in and out of a white room. The figures are cropped closely, so that much of their bodies are out of frame, leaving their shadows at the center of the photographs. These shadows stand in for the figures and represent the ideas and conversations the characters are involved in. Without the aid of digital manipulation, the artist adds colored dots to the images, which are reminiscent of apparitions in early spirit photography. The figures are both absent and present at the same instant. Kekarainen presents these color photographs at full scale and hangs them low on gallery walls so that viewers can fully interact with the figures and interiors.

I hope that my artwork progresses in a direction similar to that of Pertti Kekarainen's. The absent subject is the focus of my current series of photographs, and I love how, in this artist's work, the shadows are more fully realized than the figures. The veil of colored dots within the images add another layer of intrigue and complexity that works extremely well.


http://www.helsinkischool.fi/helsinkischool/artist.php?id=9021


http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5132959

http://www.artnews.org/gallery.php?i=384&exi=11088

Thursday Entry: Suspension

This indeterminate, frozen duration corresponds well to the reflective engrossed nature the characters in her works usually present"
-Alberto Martin

Martin, A. (2001) "Strata of Appearance"
Florence Paradeis, 50-52.

Author Alberto Martin examines the phototgraphy and films of artist Florence Paradeis in his essay, "Strata of Appearance". Paradeis truly exploits photography's ability to suspend action, as the figures in her scenes are caught immersed in their own thoughts. In one half of her dyptych, "Tete a Tete", a female figure pours out a glass of red wine, while beneath the table, a man reaches for a fallen fork. The flow of the wine is suspended as is the man, as he gazes at the dirtied utensil; his introspective stare suggests that he has just been transported to another place. His hand is outstretched but his mind prevents him from completeing the action he set out to perform. Martin writes that Paradeis' photos show gestures that lead to "an interior sphere". It is with an obsessive glance that the heroine in "La cuisinere" attempts to wrap a raw chicken in aluminum foil. Just like in the previous dyptych, the figure in this scene is caught up in her own thoughts sparked by the mundane action of covering a chicken in foil.

Paradeis' work sat with me for a while before I could appreciate it. It was not until I saw the "Tete a Tete" pictures that I began to realize just what the artist was articulating. I love the photographic depiction of suspension and have tried to bring that to my own series. It is the in-between moments, the hesitation between states, that really causes me to pay attention to what is being shown. The figures in my current work are trapped in a similar state between ignorance and full knowledge of what is before them.

Sunday Entry: Aino Kannisto

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5132966

http://www.m-bochum.de/artist_image.php?aid=66

http://www.women2003.dk/artists.php?id=46

Photographer Aino Kannisto is another talent to have graduated with her Masters from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland. Kannisto was born in Finland in 1973 and makes "constructed pictures", carefully staged color tableaux, which feature the artist herself. She compares her photographs to literature, more specifically to short stories. Each image stars Kannisto and captures moments both dramatic and intimate. The image, "Untitled (Woman in Water)" presents a tense moment as a woman raises her head above the surface of a lake; her face is pained and vulnerable as her eyes scan her remote surroundings. In another tableaux, called, "Untitled (Classroom)", the artist sits alone at the back of an unpopulated schoolroom. The pale blue desks and chairs complement the mood of the subject, who stairs off to the side, lost in thought. Kannisto's presence in each image helps to create a narrative between the disparate scenes and each photo seems to have its own backstory.

Aino Kannisto begins planning out each scene by creating sketches and writing short stories. She writes out a script of sorts for what must occur in the scene and what has led up to that specific point. I always start off with small sketches of how I'd like my photographs to be composed before shooting. I think this type of directorial preparation allows for precise expression of your original idea, and permits the photographer to worry less about the actual compostition on the day of shooting, since it has been considered beforehand.

Thursday Entry: Unity

"This type of constructive dialogue, carried by a spirit of togetherness, is quite uncommon amongst larger groups of successful artists"
-Rupert Pfab

Phab, R. (2005) "Paradigm and Discourse: The Helsinki School of Photography".
The Helsinki School, 219-222.

Art Historian Rupert Phab's essay illustrates the connections and shared themes interwoven through the artwork of the Helsinki School in Finland. This group of artists were all taught at the University of Arts and Design Helsinki, and share common sensibilities, such as an acute awareness of historical paintings, a robust knowledge and ability to comment on contemporary international art, a sense of reflection on the medium of photography, and a unified mood of contemplation and melancholy. Artist Elina Brotherus demonstrates her appreciation for art history with her series of self-portraits set in disparate landscapes. Brotherus places herself in dynamic natural surroundings and integrates her form, whether naked or clothed, into the composition. Her photographs reference the work of painter Caspar David Friedrich in addition to numerous other artists who have worked with the nude figure in a landscape. Jorma Puranen refers to both art history and the medium of photography with his series of reproductions. By photographing famous oil paintings on display in museums with harsh lighting reflecting off of their surfaces, Puranen comments on the limitations of photographic reproduction and reality. The artists of the Helsinki school are also known for their conceptual, narrative photography and their reluctance to document society in a straight manner.

Unity can be as important within a group of artists from the same school as it is within an artist's own body of work. I have endeavored to allow my concepts to evolve and grow with time. What I have found myself most interested in, the absent subject and liminality, has been present in some form or another throughout my photography. It is fascinating to see how a basic concept can take on different, sometimes divergent, shapes over time.

Sunday Entry: Thomas Demand

Photographer Thomas Demand was born in Munich, West Germany in 1964. While at Goldsmiths College in London, he studied sculpture and pioneered an ingenious way to incorporate his love of sculpture with the medium of photography. In his studio, Demand re-creates locations he finds in newspaper photographs using cardboard and paper. His full-scale re-creations depict politically charged environments, which are not always recognizable to the pubic. Demand photographs the scenes he creates, and then destroys the model; the photographs are the only record of the work. Despite the enormous amount of work the artist puts into each re-creation, the images lack specific details once viewed up close. This intentional lack of detail is to emphasis the gap that exists between reality and fiction. In Demand's "Bathroom Image" the viewer finds a seemingly innocuous scene, in which a pulled- back shower curtain reveals a bathtub still filled with water. Demand based this photographed model on a press photograph of a hotel bathroom where German politician Uwe Barchel's body was discovered. He continues to work with this concept and his images include both elaborately created interiors and exteriors. The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of Demand's artwork in 2005.

I admire the quiet suspense in each image. Once you learn about Demand's concept, your mind begins to wonder about the events that once filled these iconic scenes. Although our processes of art-making are clearly different, I am inspired by the way he can create a tableau by hand, using only cardboard, and elicit such a powerful response from his audience.

http://www.thomasdemand.de

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2005/demand.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/arts/design/04KIMM.html

Thursday Entry: Artifice

"This is not a pipe"
-Henri Magritte

Laakso, H. (2006) "Restless Ways of Worldmaking".
Reality in the Making, 6-7.

The work of artist Ville Lenkkeri is, according to critic Harri Laakso, related to an endless stream of museum-goers passing by an exhibit. Lenkkeri photographs the very type of scene that one would observe in a museum, real life interacting with staged dioramas. These two separate worlds meet unnervingly in Lenkkeri's body of work. Visitors lean against glass cases containing miniatures, and in some images, actually enter the dioramas. Her work is upfront about what is real and what is not. The viewer can easily discern the artificiality of the wax dummies, miniature battlefronts, and taxidermied elephants and lions. Laasko claims that some type of artificiality is always present in this medium,"photography never gives us what it shows". Reality is never truly reflected in a photograph. In a way, these dioramas, like photography itself, are like a memory; the event is represented, but not in an exact, unbiased manner.

Theatricality and a suspension of disbelief are key elements of my own work. I prefer to stage a scene and select gestures and props, rather than just capture an event as it unfolds. The unusual, harsh lighting that I introduce into environments signals a shift from the real world into an enhanced, dramatized tableau. Unlike Ville Lenkkeri, whose work shows a division between what is real and what is false, my photographs are complete works of fiction.

Sunday Entry: Laura Letinsky

Canadian photographer Laura Letinsky draws inspiration from classic Renaissance paintings. She was born in 1962 and did not start taking photographs until her late teens. While at the University of Manitoba, the artist wanted to study painting but did not have the necessary prerequisites for the class; she had to take a photography course instead. She became enamored on the idea of making a photograph, instead of just taking one, and furthered her studies at Yale, where she received her MFA. Originally, Letinsky's artwork captured intimate scenes between couples. She captured private, sexual scenes, which eventually featured the artist herself, until she was awarded a Guggenheim Grant and was able to study in Rome. Surrounded by such a fertile atmosphere, Letinsky began to study Renaissance paintings closely, and was particularly interested in Leonardo Davinci's "The Last Supper". After noticing the importance of the food on the table in that painting, Letinsky began to stage photographs of just tables spread out with food, their dinners having left halfway through a meal. Even without people in the images, their is a distinct sense of their presence. The food left behind is often devoured halfway, as if the tables were still inhabited. The lighting in these scenes is cool and "angelic".

What I find so powerful about these scenes, is the way the viewer has to imagine just what situations took place at these meals, and why they were left in such a state. The absence of people in the series is striking. Laura Letinsky's I did not remember I had forgotten series was recommended to me because of a series I made last year, which featured a similar sense of absence. I created a series of tableaux featuring the remnants of child's birthday party. One of my scenes is similar to Letinsky's in that it depicts an abandoned meal of cake and ice cream. All of the young revelers have gone and left fallen decorations and wrappings in their wake.




http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/laura-letinsky/index.html

http://www.houkgallery.com/letinsky/letinsky1.html

http://www.mouthtomouthmag.com/letinsky.html