LIISA LOUNILA: JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF LAST NIGHT 7.10-6.11.2011
Kalhama&Piiippo has the great pleasure to open artist Liisa Lounila’s (b.1976) solo exhibition featuring new body of work of the artist. In connection to the exhibition an artist book will also be published. The authors of the book are curator Luigi Fassi and researcher Sami Sjöberg. There will also be an artist interview made by curator Leevi Haapala in the publication.
In addition to her internationally acclaimed video pieces Lounila is also known as a versatile and multidisciplinary artist. The current exhibition showcases artist’s new light and minituare sculptures as well as drawings. The gloomy and industrial-inspired aesthetics typical for Lounila's works is also present in her newest pieces. Material collected from concerts and clubs - “the excess” as the artist calls it - functions as starting point for the silver and palladium plated miniature sculptures. The works express passing and grasping of fleeting moments. Like a flicker of light they manifest the immaterial - something that has once been active in its full intensity, but has since vanished and become a mere remembrance. That, which in the present might seem meaningless, turns into something mythic. This dazzle and aesthetication is a part of the mood that Lounila so skillfully captures in her art. Lounila's object based works communicate life's small, forgotten details that symbolize the emotional states of expectation and excitement, fulfillment and longing: "My work is concerned with the problems of social relationships, longing, great expectations and their sometimes tragicomic aspects. I'm fascinated by “bigger than life” emotions, rebelliousness, emptiness, subliminal experiences and the anxiety that results from not being able to achieve them," the artist depicts.
The significance of Lounila in the field of experimental art is once more acknowledged by the new body of work presented in the exhibition: by utilizing new material and techniques, in addition to breaking down the inner presuppositions of form and genre in art, she bites directly into the essence of being and experiencing. It is there the presumed border between art and “everyday realm” disappears. Curator Luigi Fassi writes in his new article:
The manifestation of natural and social phenomena is depicted by Lounila
by the hint of a shiny but obscure filter, one alienating the viewer from
living dynamism of the authenticity of life, the central idea of 20th
Century phenomenology as advocated by Edmund Husserl and defined as
Lebenswelt (the living world), meaning that provided by direct and real
experiences. What is true and what is not? How can one distinguish between
fiction and reality? Lounila seems to pose these questions in her work to
reflect upon the ontological mutations caused by contemporary media
culture and the dissolution of the integrity of the modern gaze.
Lounila made her debut at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Already at this time the young artist representing Finland made an impression with her distinct nostalgic aesthetic. Liisa Lounila is a Helsinki based artist, who has spent and worked several periods of time in New York. Lounila has participated in group exhibitions all over the world and her videos have been screened at numerous film festivals since the beginning of the 90’s. She has held solo shows at for example Wilkinson Gallery in London and Gallery of Photography in Dublin
Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary