Tuomo Rainio
Haava – Haave
Galleria Huuto Uudenmaankatu
31.1.–11.2.2007
Present and absent
Tuomo Rainio’s photographic images and video works
Digital photography expands the possibilities of photographic representation. In the exhibition Haave/a artist Tuomo Rainio uses still and moving digital images to create a vista of experiences of human existence and evanescence. Thus his work also moves towards and beyond the limits of traditional photographic representation.
The subject for Rainio’s photographs is the simultaneousness of presence and absence of human existance. In this exhibition he works on change happening between these states. The seen reality is reduced into a sequential continuum, which becomes visual through changes. The images and videos do not simply represent their subject matter. They also reveal the process of perception, of how images become consciousness. Tuomo Rainio manages to reveal a part of visual reality that is always present but rarely represented by photographic practices.
In his work, Rainio shifts from the traditional photographic logic of freezing time to characterizing the changes. People in the works are represented as present and absent at the same time. These photographs do not display reality on their visual basis but within the logic of their technique. The world of the exhibition is in a continuous process of changes: the presence flickers in motion, movement of a face draws the image, and human figures vanish when they stop.
Technically, all of these images are based on two photographs and their post-photographic double exposure. Images are generated by a simple algorithm, so that everything that is similar in two photographs is filtered out and only the difference is made visible. This same technique is used also for the video works. Image sequences are processed to visualize what is between the single images. Some of the works show only the changes, while others show the slow process of an image appearing from the accumulating changes.
The name of the exhibition is a double exposure of two words. At the same time the name indicates a technical method behind the images and creates a shift between two possible implications. Haava (wound) and Haave (dream or illusion) refer to two extremes, that direct one’s choices in life.
The exhibition is held at Gallery Huuto on 31.1. – 11.2.2007. Some of the works are also displayed in the new permanent exhibition of the Finnish Museum of Photography starting from 9th of February.
Tuomo Rainio is studying photography in the MA programme in University of Art and Design Helsinki. He has already taken part in several group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Haave/a is his first solo exhibition.
Exhibition: Tuomo Rainio, Haava/e, 31.1.-11.2.2007 Gallery Huuto, Uudenmaankatu 35, Helsinki
For further information, please contact:
BA, Tuomo Rainio, 050 3210 783, firstname.lastname(at)uiah.fi, www.rainio.pp.fi
