Jarno Parkkima
Glass: Dreams, Uncertainty & Elsewhere
28.1.-12.2.2017
Galleria Huuto Jätkäsaari – Pikkujätkä
The video Glass is a document or a trace from a period of time, when I tried to understand and express how it is to live if ones experience of reality is mainly constructed by ideals, dreams and images. Estrangement, isolation, loneliness, nonexistence and lack of interaction – these concepts say at least something about my own experience. Freedom, possibilities, being open and social, feels only ostensible – there is a glass-like wall in between an individual and his/hers external surroundings.
References to an experience of this kind of mental state and existence (or the lack of it) can be found from philosophy (especially existentialism), literature and psychotherapy. In 1968 french writer Jean Baudrillard wrote about the glass and it’s meaning: “Glass facilitates faster communication between inside and outside, yet at the same time it sets up an invisible but material caesura which prevents such communication from becoming a real opening onto the world.” This must relate to our present day as well, when “reality” is being more and more conveyed as images reflected by screens around us. We conduct these images via touch-responsive glass surfaces as well as we uphold the representation of ourselves in social media. Does the isolation protect from a friction, that arises when ideals and hopes about how we and the life lived should be, don’t correspond to how these actually appear to us?
The subject of this work is personal, yet as a result of a year-long working process there’s more questions, no answers. Perhaps the experienced isolation, the glass, is like a delusion. Perhaps the insistence to experience reality and others directly and immediately (interaction) is too idealistic. Perhaps reality and our own existence inevitably conveys and appears to us as an confusingly-interpreted image-like impression.
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