Smoke Works, 2016 -2019

From the early nineteenth century, landscapes were considered central in forging the new importance of painting as an art form. Landscapes enabled the painting to be viewed for the first time as an image in itself, not merely a representation or conduit for the allegories and stories of historical paintings. The "airiness", both in form and meaning, of the landscape as subject, meant that it lent itself well to being used as a platform from which to approach questions dealing with images themselves. This is also the role landscape plays in Kantanen’s works. As in Romantic painting, the fog rolls in to obscure the lure of perspective and pin the viewer’s gaze onto the surface and image-ness of the work. Nature is also powerfully present in Kantanen’s work. It does not, however, reside in the cultural construct that is a landscape, but rather in the photograph itself: residing in the phenomenon of light, it is actually "nature once removed”. Nature is even more present in the marks Kantanen adds to her images: the digital brushstrokes, the corrupting of the image, the stretching of forms.