Becoming Accustomed to Strangeness That Doesn’t Become Less Strange Through Acclimation (2022)

Photographic installation series, print on acrylic 1m x 1,7m, fluorescent lighting

The photo installation consists of two prints on acrylic mounted on top of each other, with a florescent light placed on top. The bright light source, usually found on dropped ceilings in office buildings, illuminates the foreground image in a way that renders the background image nearly obscured. The narrow cap between the two images further complicates the viewing of the background image.
The observable and unobservable layers of the work reflect the limitations of human abilities to fully perceive their presence in any given environment.

The title is a quote from 'Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence' by Timothy Morton, with the authors' consent


Introduction to the personal exhibition 'Petrified'

Petrified centers around the sense of detachment from the world and oneself, using familiar architectural forms from the city streets to create a backdrop of a cityscape at nightfall, where the common feelings of this time and age such as anxiety and fear of the unknown are revealed in a new light.
The stillness of the night is a good time for gathering your thoughts, but it is also the time when illuminated screens and artificial lights compete most brutally for our attention.
The video and photo installations of the exhibition are marked by continuous but aimless movement, where the characters in the videos or the motion mechanisms of the works themselves have succumbed to the endless loop.
The inability to change direction or to actively intervene in one's surroundings brings attention to irrelevant details, where it falls into the folds of perception, like the blind but ever seeing eye.

'Petrified' was curated by Eva Mustonen