The Helsinki School Perspective

About

Persons Projects extends a warm invitation to visit our summer exhibition The Helsinki School Perspective. It will be presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35 and will feature a selection of artists from the Helsinki School who were pivotal at the beginning. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect and shows how these artists used the photographic process as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting our emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s and was inspired by his own experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of 6 generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are more than 180 monographs and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book to evolve from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that the Helsinki School was built.

Part 1, we experience four different approaches to how these selected artists use the photographic process to abstract a moment in time, the passage of a day, a memory of a specific place, or the interpretation of a historical painting.

Niko Luoma draws upon art history to find his subjects for his reinterpretations. His choices range from Jacques-Louis David, through Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, to Francis Bacon in his series, Adaptations. Using his unique photographic practice, he abstracts these iconic images to produce something entirely new. The idea is not to duplicate the original but to interpret it in the spirit of how it was conceived. His images literally grow from the inside out, as he never really knows what the final image will look like until it is printed. The content of his work is all about light as it touches the film. The exposure becomes his dance, revealing the music from which he is inspired. These photographs represent 20 years of Luoma’s experimentations with light as his silent voice.

Reflections of the Ever-Changing (The Short History of Now) is Ea Vasko’s series of photographed reflections in nightly cities from a very close distance. Through the reflections, she pictures the constant change and movement that is happening in a city space. A reflection has the ability to gather the light surrounding it into one abstract picture on a surface. Vasko compares these reflections to momentary experiences: The experience of now is fresh, abstract, and still apart from a logical timeline of history that we tend to build in our heads. The abstraction and a certain kind of unpredictable quality of now are just like the picture seen in a reflection; it is not totally definable, yet, it is just a sighting. The reflection can be captured in a photograph, but it looks like the camera is too slow for the ever-changing world as well. Something in the picture has moved already during the exposure.

For Mikko Sinervo landscape is an emotional space. In his photographs, he uses im­ages of various landscapes which he combines and assembles into a single image. By blending these different images together, he builds up a personal representation of the surrounding space. Sinervo’s landscape photographs consist of layers of time and space, much like layers of sediments in a lake or seabed. The results of his manipulated photographs are beautiful abstract views in which the landscape is recognizable as such but not identifiable as a specific place. Presented at times in diptychs or triptychs, Sinervo suggests that his work be read as if one were traveling through a landscape.

Nanna Hänninen’s The New Landscapes series follows her sociological interest in the individual who senses, understands, and places herself in the outside world. These photographs become concentrated narrations of the moment and work as large color abstractions that have a more profound significance of the surrounding reality. These urban landscapes are drawings of her body movements that are captured on photographic material as rhythmic lines of light where the subject and the scenery melt into a single image. These pictorial motifs are divided into two different levels, the abstract and the actual, merging the human presence (breathing, heartbeat, laughter, talking, and walking during the time of exposure) into a photographic media that more closely resembles a painting.

Part 2 presents four other approaches, artists who form a unique image that transcends how we interpret our personal, social, and ecological landscape seeing through a Nordic approach to nature.

The photographs of Anni Leppälä seem to be an attempt to fix the past moments of life onto the picture. In enchanted sceneries, she reveals the traces of the past, having been covered underneath numerous time layers to retain the ephemeral. Small details like loose buttons in a drawer and a stain on a shirt conduce to the absence. Leppälä’s still-lifes remain as vague indications for obliterating memories, capturing the fragments of transitory moments. In her sensitive compositions, she creates indications of memories in which one can perceive moments of its own past. “My interest in photography is closely related to time in the past tense, to the possibility of being able to make a moment motionless, to make something stand still”, states the artist.

Janne Lehtinen has exercised an extremely personal approach in reflecting upon his life and how he has evolved into the person he is today. Lehtinen uses life as his basic contextual material for his self-reflections and his photographs as a means for projecting his attitudes toward life. He fuses a Fluxus mentality with the Nordic sense of stoicism. Most importantly, Lehtinen is a storyteller. In his Where the Earth Ends series Lehtinen chose such places that best served as a stage for his performances. Playing with the elements – wind, light, water – the diversity of landscapes, and accessories taken from everyday life, he has constructed a narrative that is both poetic and absurd. In his photographs, he retraces the experience thus lived and makes us share his vision of the crossed landscapes.

Miklos Gaál’s photographic landscapes, or urban views, are usually taken from distant and elevated viewpoints and characterized by an illogical distribution of blurred and sharp zones within the picture. This mixture of in-focus and out-of-focus areas lends the photographs an unreal quality, like toy worlds or mock decors. To achieve this effect, Gaál manipulates the film plate within the camera. His method is partly random, he never knows exactly how the pictures will appear in the end. Gaál has been using this method of manipulating the image for 20 years now, transforming the real into something unknown and strange, something that the viewer not only looks at but also studies and questions. He comments on his work: “The photographic blur arouses my interest because it shows reality in a new way. The blur prevents the viewer from getting the full view of the picture at once. I am interested in showing something familiar in a new, unfamiliar, even uncanny way.”

Throughout his career, Ilkka Halso has focused his photography on protecting, restoring, and understanding the anatomy of nature. His photographs beginning back in the year 2000, have visually explored how we as a culture must develop new approaches to perceiving as well as reevaluating the natural resources we so commonly take for granted. Halso builds structures by himself, either physically or digitally in his studio, to protect the lakes, rivers, and forests, not only from man-made pollution but from our direct misuse of precious resources. The artist states: “When putting nature into a museum, you have to take into consideration the aspect of the audience/consumer. Nature becomes a joyride for tourists or a beautiful landscape turns into a meditative theatre show.”