Salla Tykkä - “Zoo”

Thru 08 May 2012

Finnish artist Salla Tykkä employs themes such as voyeurism,
perfectionism, obsession and sexual identity in forms of visual narratives
of daily life in her works. Dirimart Garibaldi is pleased to present Tykkä’s
“Zoo” between the dates
12 April- 8 May.
Her film/video installations tell stories in which the artist makes the
protagonist face unexpected encounters and conf licts and odd situations.
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s)
mortality, vulnerability, mutability”. It is a truth which, having seen
Salla Tykkä’s Zoo seems fully applicable to the medium of film. Zoo is not
just a film about how the phootgraphic-filmic eye conditions perception
and memory in our visual culture; it is also a film about the complex
relationship between culture and nature.
Zoo follows a young female protagonist as she walks through a deserted
zoo, peering at the animals in different enclosures and occasionally
photographing them, subtly conveying a sense of independence,
intelligence and a mounting state of anxiety.
The camera follows and circles her with thrilling ease and increasing
insistence,
to become like a second character. Its freedom of movement almost matches
that of the eye itself, and especially the character’s increasingly restless
glances.
A “camera” that looks at another camera, through the eye of the lens we
catch sights of images that associatively evoke memories of images stored
in our memory. The specific succession of psychological references and
iconological associations are Tykkä’s attempt to stress that our consumption
of photographic and filmic images radically conditions our perceptions.
The young woman in the film seems at first to be photographing the zoo
animals but as the film unfolds, the perspective shifts and we get the
impression that she is aware of being part of a larger photo or film herself.
In the course of the film, Tykkä succeeds in creating an atmosphere
in which subject and object constantly seem to switch places which,
kaleidoscope-style, whips up the tensions between both to fever pitch.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Photos by others, add your photo

See all photos