Oula Salokannel
Old Stairs, New Steps
Gallery Huuto Jätkäsaari 1
20 April – 5 May 2013
FIRST OF MAY OPEN HOURS: tue 31.4. open 12 – 4 pm, wed 1.5. closed.
The group of works I have compiled could well be characterized as a “spring exhibition”. In addition to the timing of the exhibition, the exhibition contains several signs of spring or at least references, like a picture of demolition waste drying in the sunlight. A more serious thematic interpretation should, however, be carried out with both eyes at least slightly open and with extreme caution, I might add, because we are now on very thin ice. You see, when I work with images, they are always closely related to spring. Even if I am doing some kind of exhibition about spring, it is the other themes that take shape through the collection of works and to convey these themes one needs both spring and the exhibition.
Spring is like a tool that is made up of various pictures of time and individual paths on a fragile crust of snow. Peri-urban historical imageries associated with spring, like different genres and language usages, open towards many directions when used. However, at the same time they try to set an overview and expectations for the future. In terms of temporal intensity, the concept of spring is perhaps exceptionally strong, as spring is also associated with some kind of overload in the “influential environment” or “emotional side”, a disruption or “awakening”. Springtime is therefore a metaphor for an outlook on life that swears by insecurity: a vulnerable gaze, a threat and incompleteness, a double-edged sword and the eternal coming. When I’m writing this, it is mid-March and the sun is shining in the cloudless sky. When I take photographs, the snow appears overexposed.
My work focuses on the pictorial nature of thinking, the so-called dynamics of becoming an image, the relationship between an image and time. The use or passing of time compares to thinking as continuous “emergence” – as a dynamic continuum of becoming an image. My aim is to suspend an image between different narrative traditions, into a space of becoming an image. Experiential dimensions – “the time of a picture” realized in mediations of observation and memory as well as the virtual and layered, politically significant “picture of the times” – only exist through each other and for each other. It’s exciting to think that time can eventually be something almost concrete, like a radiator or a window.
I see an image as a resource that actively produces time. What happens to time when the resource diminishes? What is created when the multiplicity of images is replaced at once by a landscape or “vision”, a mainstream view? Or what happens when a person doing the cleaning gets rid of something they believe is useless and unnecessary? “Modernization” is about lighting up shady streets and clearing overgrown lots as if to clean up contaminated soil. Does time become thin or long? Do the last themes run out of fertile soil? Creating an image can actually mean some kind of resistance to the present, in other words it is a production of “another time”, supporting a continuum. The inability of an image to hold the viewer’s interest may lead the eyes to focus on, for example, the edge of a gypsum board and from there to the conceptual content associated with the material. Materials are, after all, also part of our neighborhoods’ history where early spring cleaning, words and actions are constantly connected with new images.
oulass(at)gmail.com
www.oulasalokannel.net
