'Procession of Spectres' by Ville Kansanen

 

The Cornel/Henry Art is pleased to introduce Ville Kansanen, a Finish artist based in California, working with photography, sculpture, video and land art. A self-taught artist, he was awarded the Discovery of the Year Lucie Award (2015,) was named the Fine Art Photographer of the Year by the International Photography Awards (2015,) and has been featured in several publications such as American Photo Magazine, GUP Magazine, SFAQ, and Diffusion Magazine. The primary focus of his work relates to digital photography as a unique metaphysical space. A space with its idiosyncratic physics that are uniquely adapted for the practice of the creation of reverence: the creation of meaningful relationships with Nature and the sublime. His work seeks to mimic, simulate and interact with natural phenomena that humankind has revered as supernatural, and which formed the basis for nascent religious belief systems.

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“…the permanent-seeming self is actually an endless procession of disjointed moments.”

– Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist

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The Procession of Spectres engages with vast landscapes to examine the fragmentary nature of the human condition and the emergence of self. The images are from a period where I experienced a kind of “awakening” after a long period of depression. I had forgotten the very basics of who I was.  To break the emotional paralysis, I turned to self-portraiture to transform the experience into an investigation into the transitional nature of the experiential self. My interest in theories on the concept of self  and consciousness strongly informed the series. I think of the photographs in this series as a liminal spaces for consciousness, nature and emotions — an inscape.*

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* inscape is a concept derived by Gerard Manley Hopkins from the ideas of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. Hopkins felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes a dynamic individual identity. For Roberto Matta, 20th century Chilean surrealist, inscape meant expressing internal experiences within landscape. - Ville Kansanen

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