Sometimes you may dream of a person you haven’t seen in years, or someone
who is distant in some other way, dead even. In the dream this person is suddenly
intensely present, he/she may come close to you, touch you, even caress you.
When you wake up from the dream you feel good, warm and full somehow.
Gradually this feeling of being loved merges into a kind of longing: you start to
realize that the meeting with the other was in fact nothing but a dream. It was a
creation of your own mind, a glimpse at your own imaginary world.
The same kind of longing can be aroused by many kinds of dreams. One might for
example dream of a big city. In the dream, one will have just arrived in a metropolis
for the first time, eager to discover its streets full of promise (or threat, if its a bad
dream). Sometimes one might also dream of entering one’s own home, a house,
which has suddenly changed, become bigger and more complex. There might be a
new room in the house (and maybe from that secret room opens a door into yet
another new room, and so on.)
In my work I aim towards the slightly disturbing, melancholy sensation that follows
such dreams. It is a strange sort of longing for something/someplace that doesn’t
really exist. It is a kind of a phantom pain, caused by the discord between reality and
a person’s own inner world. At the same time I’m also interested in the following
themes: love, sexuality, family relations, the difficulty of truly facing another person,
loneliness. There are elements of all of these in my work.
Ida Pimenoff received her Master’s Degree in Photography from the University of
Art and Design Helsinki in 2004. Her works have been shown in several group
exhibitions in Finland and in France. Her previous solo exhibition Where the Light
Falls on Your Skin was in Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in Helsinki in 2006.
The exhibition has been kindly supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation,
the Arts Council of Finland and Konstsamfundet.
