light | vision - Saara Salmi

The rabbit hole was deeper than we thought. Get lost in the darkness as the story of Alice continues in Saara Salmi's solo show at Galleria Volga.

Saara Salmi is half of the photography studio Atelieri O. Haapala, the arbiter of all things Victorian.

light | vision - Ilona Sampovaara

The Unhappy Rabbits show at Art Alex Gallery is a study of how guilt can disguise itself as innocence. Ilona Sampovaara's new works tie together themes such as Adam and Eve, playfulness and the cruelty of children.

Ilona is a Finnish artist residing in Mexico, and the works in the gallery show the progression in her themes from the anthropomorphism of dogs to exposing the sins and fragilities of humans through using animals as images. Ilona also uses her paintings as muses in her Victorian-esque jewelry line, the Bug Girl Co. Small glimpses of faces and little objects decorate tempting silver and brass lockets and charm bracelets made with vintage beads and Swarovski crystals.

light | vision - Artist Peter Jones

You need color. Color environments have the power to calm, energize, enrage, entice and inspire you.

Peter Jones' Colourscape is a maze of colored spheres suspended above the ground with ropes. Allow yourself to be yellow for a while, or sit in gray and allow yourself to absorb the blending colors around you. At times the true color is too intense to interpret, and at times you will be soothed like a baby.

Colourscape is part of the Turku European Capital of Culture 2011 program.

light | vision - Artist Vesa-Pekka Rannikko

The Aalto pavilion in Venice as reinterpreted by Vesa-Pekka Rannikko

Vesa-Pekka Rannikko whitewashes architecture, art and the act of displaying art at the Venice Biennale. In the installation "...and all structures are unstable", the familiar Aalto pavilion is covered in a temporary and transient sheath of white boards. Inside, the video shows repainted found paintings, found paintings being painted over in white, and the process of painting the white screen for the video, all overlaid with new color.

Everything becomes white, or even nothing, in the end.  Rannikko calls into question what art and its display really mean, if they mean anything or if it means everything to the work. Does it matter if a painting is whitewashed, or simply repainted? The haunting images of Rannikko's found paintings, which he repainted in black and white, lead us through a new understanding of whitewash.

Unknown (2010) by Vesa-Pekka Rannikko. Repainted found painting in black and white

light | vision - Photographer Milla-Kariina Oja

From the home series, Border of a City, 2010

Is home where you live, or is it where you are? Photographer Milla-Kariina Oja places dreams about home in settings of harsh reality in her new series, Home-Project. The settings are both very familiar and local or very foreign and distant. You are either lost or found, but always alone no matter where you find home to be.

 

If you can, see it in person at Valokuvagalleria Hippolyte before the 29th of April.