invited guest: Anni Leppälä

Last autumn, 2008.

"My interest towards 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. That something has existed, and has now been set in static state. There is a certain aspect of lost moments and a feeling of letting go when looking at photographs. They exist at the intersection of the momentary and the constant, between the fleeting feeling of being alive and consciousness of the moments passing by.

Living room, 2008.

Feeding, 2007.

Autumn, 2007

In my pictures, attempts in recognising and lighting of obscure and vague movements, are made visible. I want to approach the momentariness of living through constancy. The paradox is that when you try to conserve or protect a moment by stopping it, by photographing it, you inevitably lose it at the same time. I am interested in exploring these contradictions and borderlines between things, how distance relates to closeness.

Being there, 2007.

Rooms: girl in a museum, 2007.

Symbolic meanings are essential in my works. I am interested in how the concrete surface of reality and photographs relate to metaphorical things that can be found underneath. I try to trace those kinds of occasions of seeing when words dissolve and scatter apart, objects and incidents intensify into symbolic language, silent information and intuitive interpretation. What fills the room behind the picture, allows one to step closer. Thoughts of incompleteness and insecurity are also important to my works.

Museum curtains, 2007.

With Flora (portrait of an ancestor), 2008.

Dollhouse, 2005

Objects and spaces can occur to be like transparent routes between the inside and the outside, between the seen surface and unconscious content. Museums and miniature rooms become entrances to each other. Balance and its fragility, delicacy are present simultaneously. How to stop a feeling, a memory? By binding it to visible objects, facades of material things, attaching it to a room’s walls, the surface of photographs. Like translucent skin with unforeseen memories beneath." - Anni Leppälä

Garden, 2007.

Anni Emilia Leppälä, born in Helsinki 1981 and student of the University of Art and Design Helsinki has exhibited her work in several countries since 2001 including Sweden, France and Germany. This year her work is seen in Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku Finland and Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France among other places. Her work can also bee seen in collections at the Helsinki City Art Museum, the Finnish Institute in London, the Teutloff Collection, Germany etc.

See more of Annis work at Helsinki School/Artists.
invited by ulf fågelhammar