Horizons

How do I define a landscape? It at least is much more than just a sum of shapes, colors, and light for me. In it is the universe with all its manifestations: grief, longing, dreams, beauty, world politics, environmental disasters, and violence. Emptiness, vastness, the past, the present, and the future. What is visible to the eye is a huge source of fascination for me. As an artist, it allows my imagination to continue freely and mold the world beyond, behind, and in the landscape. The landscape is a canvas permanently open to interpretation.

This is a collection of perspectives, where the union of image and word plays a remarkable role. A sense of craftsmanship was a key for me during the creative process. The long process is designed to push the photograph toward a painting, like aesthetics and logic. The end product is not intended to look like a realistic, documentary-style reproduction of the landscape’s forms. Rather, the idea is to subject images toward "errors” and imperfections. Words and sentences inscribed on the images multiply new levels of meaning. They can politicize or poeticize. I use the words to create a new identity for the landscape to show the way I have observed and experienced it—to increase the conceptual content.
The line where land, water, and sky are meeting is the point our visual outlook ends. Beyond and behind it lies a space where the imagination is located. The horizon is not just a visual convergence of the three elements, but a mental interface, the beginning of a continuously expanding room of dreams and promises. Beyond the horizon is always a place, a space, a land that is home to an infinity of realities. Humanity has always needed to believe that beyond their everyday experience there is something better, something worth to striving for. Beyond the horizon there lies our hope for a better future. The horizon has served as a motivation, a force to take us onward. Sometimes life offers weird turning points, situations and places where people have to face their history, perhaps dreams that did not work out like they had hoped, and even fears and disappointments. Everyday life can be unsure, questionable, no less than threatening. On the other hand, disabled life can always contain a lot of beauty, which we simply are not aware of to identify. Imperfection and mysterious beauty are in the end very close to each other. Put together they are a poem about reality. Think about a family who decides to create their own little and beautiful paradise, like people in California do. Except in this case, it has been realized beside the Arctic Circle. Think about an abandoned swimming pool in the Finnish countryside. One could interpret that as quite a melancholic endeavor. On the other hand, it definitely includes a certain amount of humanism and humor, even though it’s slightly twisted. Psychology, sociology, life, death, anger, and love all make their own collected history. But show me a more absurd and touching example than that of human life, please.