Kaisa Kontio
Epithet of Duration
Galleria Huuto Uudenmaankatu
4.1.–15.1.2006
First I just wanted to try to make time visible. I photographed different places in different times and then I connected the photos into one panorama. The length of the period varies in each photo. In the first ones the morning turns into the evening. Later on, the periods have been drawn out longer, the seasons changed. I fancy the idea how a photo, perceived to be a blink of an eye, turns out to have duration. Time which is much longer than the time we imagine a photo to have on the grounds of the shuttering times.
The works in my exhibition are polymer photogravyres. The way I work is quite slow. I process the photos I have taken into films and further into pressing plates. The plates I proof in a way typical of the traditional intaglio printmaking. I cannot cut any corners since the process is part of the result. I want to believe that the slowness of the process comes across also in my pictures. I think that in a certain way also receiving my pictures requires slowness. When taking a fast glance at my landscapes, one cannot perceive the changes of time in them. Only those, who have time to stop, can see something out of line.
Peter Høeg writes in his novel Borderliners: ”Time means sensing that behind those changes which are an expression of time, there is fellowship.” In Høeg’s text I recognize something about the way time is being outlined in my pictures. ”We mean changes. And we mean something unchangeable. We mean something that moves. But against an unmoving background. And vica versa. — consciounsness of time involves the double sense of constancy and change.”
When I started to depict time, I soon had to face its relativity and diversity: individual, collective, cyclic, linear, comparative, absolute, inestimable, measurable, universal, local, imaginary and absolutely true. Time is all that. Also many of my works were born out of this discussion about the essence of time. But I still think that when outlining the diversity of time I am only in the starting point.
kkontio(at)uiah.fi
040-7398637
