Salla Myllylä
Surround
Galleria Huuto Jätkäsaari
28.3. – 12.4.2015
Galleria Huuto Jätkäsaari is open during Easter holidays 3.-6.4.2015 at 12-5 pm., exceptionally on Monday also!
Over the past three years I have been developing the idea of physically adding an outline or a mask to video by taping, painting or scratching. The idea arose from a frustration with lens-based images. It felt impossible to direct the viewer’s attention to exactly where I wanted it. At first the outline itself was important, but then I began to think that the gesture of drawing is more essential. Hence, I began to show the gesture in my works, giving them a performance-like character.
Removing an object from its background is one of the most basic printing and image editing processes. In the past it was done by physically carving the image plate, later using various overpainting and exposure techniques and today with image editing programs. There is a specific term for this process in Finnish, “syväys” (literally translated as “making deep”), which is the Finnish name of the exhibition. Some contemporary artists such as Tacita Dean, Rachel Whiteread and Ed Ruscha have used the act of painting out the environment of an object in a photograph as an esthetic gesture.
In my opinion, this is such a common, simple and basic process in visual culture that it has become almost invisible. It is where the professional practices of graphic design and the interfaces between different visual arts mediums intersect in a fascinating manner. Art historian James Elkins has said that the surround, the background which is unavoidably part of a photograph, is the most significant difference between a photograph and a painting.
In this exhibition’s works I have “released” commonplace items – plants and furniture – from their environment, inspired by the 1600s still life paintings as well as everyday product images. I have either painted the image area with white or black pigmented buttermilk or I have covered the area with soot and then scraped the surface to bring out the object. As the mask I have created is physical not digital, it leaks: light dyes it, it is translucent, side light shows its surface structure, it freezes in cold weather and rain washes it away. I let all this become part of my works.
The videos and series of still images in this exhibition showcase the results of my experiments over the past three years. This exhibition is a follow-up to the Notes from the Harbor exhibition I held in the same space during the spring of 2013.
I wish to thank the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Kone Foundation for their support.
Salla Myllylä is a Helsinki-based artist working in between drawing and moving image. She graduated from the Free Art School in 2009 and from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2014.
Further information:
Salla Myllylä
salla.myllyla(at)gmail.com
puh. 040 181 0500
www.sallamyllyla.com
