dylan ray arnold – Growth of the Night Plants
Growth of the Night Plants consists of a sculptural installation and printed drawing-collages. The exhibition tells about the relationships between interiority, metamorphosis and the small deaths living in them. The body of work grows from manipulated interior materials; from gestures of upholstery, cut-out and assemblage, as well as drawing and ceramic work, in which withdrawal, hiding, covering, displaying, and expression take spatial forms. Following the logic of a private garden, laying on, or rising from the ground, the installation proposes postures, surfaces and apertures that take shape in the twilight of the night.
The curator/writer Katia Porro writes: “The physical dimensions of consciousness are put to rest, pushing flowers from bed-replacing drawers in the night. And if nocturnality may suggest a certain obscurity, the night that is summoned here is one that evokes a fertile reverie, one that flirts with a certain psychedelia. Everything is breathing, pulsating, hiding, revealing, looking and stumbling awkwardly as accumulated objects manifest the everyday/night experience, however overwhelming it may be. The redundancy, absurdity yet importance of systems – think nervous, digestive, circadian and root – present themselves as a still image of metamorphosis. In this spatial diagram in which everything is intrinsically relational, the draw-er — the artist — and the drawer present us with a need for withdrawal — a withdrawal that is nevertheless transformative. And although the blooming of the night flowers cue their own demise, one isn’t to forget that death is always a possible outcome in play. In Growth of the Night Plants, dylan ray arnold offers an insight into how the hermetic figure’s rumination, or the depths of a drawer, are not simply destinations in pure dust, but rather generative and imaginative stopping places necessary for transformation.
dylan ray arnold is a visual artist from Helsinki who works with sculpture, installation, drawing, assemblage, printed matter and video. Their practice also includes collaboration with artist Océane Bruel. Their works have been exhibited in e.g. In Helsinki at HAM gallery (2020), Alkovi (2019), P7T art space (2022), Turku Art Hall (2020) and Titanik gallery (2022) and abroad at Tallinn Art Hall (2019), in Paris at artist-run spaces GlassBox (2019) and Pauline Perplexe (2022). Their works are in the collections of The Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki Art Museum and Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki.
The artist and the exhibition have been supported by Kone Foundation and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
www.dylanrayarnold.com
IG: dylanrayarnold
Eeva Hannula & Ville Kumpulainen – The image was wide and it swayed towards
Eeva Hannula and Ville Kumpulainen‘s first joint exhibition The image was wide and it swayed towards navigates in thoughts and emotions between the borders of photographs, eruptions, reconstructions, and poetic gestures. The exhibited works are photo-based collages, sculptures, and textual works made physically and digitally using different materials.
The style of the two artists finds a crossing point in the utilisation of various fragments as building material for photo collages, sculptures, and text-based works. The image and text fragments appearing in the works have been collected from internet archives, old books, and traces of drawings. Word fragments serve as a poetic element in the exhibition and as a further voice alongside the images. New spaces of thinking open up between the physical works and the imagination proposed by the words. The artists engage in an intuitive dialogue in the exhibition, which helps to dispel the idea of a single author. In the shared home of the artist duo, the dialogue between the works started long before the exhibition found its physical form. The exhibition also features co-created works by Hannula and Kumpulainen.
The constant flow of photographs, their absurd reproducibility, and the velocity of the medium guided us to look for ways to slow down our co-existence with photographic material by layering the forms and gestures of image reconstruction through various intermediate stages. We have listened to the chatter of materials such as plaster and clay alongside photo collages and allowed dialogues to emerge between fragments of images, lost words, and sculptures. We took an interest in the nature of plaster, a material that solidifies quickly and is traditionally associated with the act of copying. We saw this as a parallel to the sudden imprint that a photograph stamps in the course of time. The malleable nature of clay, on the other hand, found a mirror in the ever-evolving essence of digital editing.
Our images have hands, they fumble around to find remnants of objects, materials, and treatments to place on their surfaces, sides, and insides. They draw in endless layers of traces. We strive to create a space in the exhibition where different fragments form visual sequences. The chitchat of images passing between us suggests paths that cross between the works. The exhibition contains notes on the processes of the creation of meanings, how they change, break, or condense between different images, pieces of text, materials, and objects. The processes of something new forming and something dissolving become key questions.
The exhibition and the work of the artists have been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and Kone Foundation.
Eeva Hannula (b. 1983) is an artist working with text and photography from Helsinki. Her works combine photo collages, sculptural elements, and visual and written poetry. Through her work, Hannula likes to consider the limits of photography, the connections between text and image, and the transformations of digital and physical traces. Eeva Hannula graduated as a visual artist from the Turku Arts Academy in 2012 and completed her Master’s degree in Photography at Aalto University in 2017. Hannula has also studied Aesthetics and Literature at the University of Helsinki (BA) and Creative Writing at the Critical Academy in Finland. Since 2012, Hannula’s works have been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally. In 2019, she published Amorphous Writings, a book merging visual and written poetry with images.
Ville Kumpulainen (b. 1988, Rovaniemi) is a visual artist from Helsinki who approaches spaces and concepts experimentally through producing images. He examines different visual realities through photographs, words, objects, and archival images. Kumpulainen graduated as a visual artist from the Turku Arts Academy in 2016 and completed his Master’s degree in Photography at Aalto University in 2019. The German publishing house Hatje Cantz published his book Out of Sight in 2017. His works have been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally.
Translation: Simo Vassinen
Pilvi Ojala – Hahmotelmia
The exhibition is the image of its creator. It is an effort to organize the internal chaos of the head and an attempt to focus on something essential in everyday life, where everything is in abundance and too much.
Making art is a way for me to perceive the world and place myself in it. I am interested in trying new things and I switch from one technique and material to another. This may seem like indecision or lack of concentration, but for me it is the main motivation for working. My artistic work is a kind of dissertation: I observe, state, collect material, edit, report and put things together.
I’m interested in the presentation of things. Staging, illusions, artificiality and authenticity are themes that fascinate my mind. In addition to art museums, I am also inspired by historical, natural science and curiosities museums as well as theater and film museums. Fine art has offered me the opportunity to combine my various interests into a personal cabinet of curiosities.
I have long been interested in maps. There is an expression in Finnish ‘olla kartalla’, which translates into English literally as ‘to be on the map’, but it also carries the meaning of ‘being aware of what is happening’ – being on the map calms the mind, places and locates me. On the other hand, staring at a map on the screen of a mobile phone or some other device weakens spatial thinking and fragments the world into rectangular pieces.
The map is also a kind of stage where things happen. Especially in historical times, maps were illustrated with different events or things. The most imaginative creatures roamed in them, and they excited the human imagination at a time when not everything had been discovered yet. A map can also be a microscopic view of the inside of an organism or a means of memory recall.
The works in the exhibition do not represent real places, people or things. They are pictorial play and immersion in the moment of making.
Pilvi Ojala (b. 1973, Helsinki) graduated in 2001 from the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Graphic Arts. Ojala has held solo exhibitions since 2000 and has participated in group and joint exhibitions since 1996. Her works are in public collections such as the Amos Anderson Art Museum, HAM, Hämeenlinna Art Museum, Jyväskylä Art Museum, the State Art Collection and the collection of the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation.