Plane Adaption - Niko Luoma

The past ten years Luoma has been continually working with entirely abstract visual content through the medium of photography. His method involves a calculated, analogue technique of repeatedly exposing a single negative to lines of light, sometimes up to thousands of times, thus generating what has been denoted as "abstract photographs of time”.

Photographic function becomes content itself: what Luoma’s works have in common is their self-referentiality, in that they point towards the moment of exposure -the process of their own creation- in medium-reflexive way. Though intricately systemized parameters and number sequences are determined by Luoma prior to the exposures, he never knows what the final result will look like. His works are constituted by their inherent tension of order and chance.

"I Plunge into Black Holes and Emerge Intact"

I move freely between the sun and the moon.
I go further
I plunge into black holes and emerge intact.
I ride on comets, count galaxies.
I’m on speaking terms with lights-years.

"I plunge into black holes and emerge intact” is the continuation in the series of group shows showing new positions in photography, within the Gallery program of conceptually rigorous artistic practitioners. The summer show takes its point of departure in a poem by the Lebanese-American poet, essayist and visual artist, Etel Adnan, whose thoughts on the importance of light and luminosity, abstraction and consciousness will form the core of the display. Placing viewers in a realm of visual perceptual experience, the exhibition explores contemporary abstraction in photography and the permanence of light: its cosmic origins, multifaceted uses and atmospheres, which are highlighted through five different approaches of singular artists.

Curated by Maya Byskov, Laura García M-T and Terhi Tuomi.

Ulla Jokisalo - How to be both

Gallery Taik Persons proudly presents Ulla Jokisalo’s solo exhibition How to be both with her newest assemblages and installations.

The artist Ulla Jokisalo cuts, masks, embroiders and perforates image fragments. With needles, pins and thread she attaches and binds together parts of reality, creating her own surrealistic universe. Jokisalo is an architect of images, who through the use of cutouts, highlights opposites and contradictions. In her newest works, the artist mainly uses found and ready made image material, which she combines to create transformational stories about human life.

Displacement

Gallery Taik Persons is proud to present Displacement, the first in a series of curated group exhibitions showing new positions by young artists working with (and around) the medium of photography.

The title of the show refers to the distance that exists between experience and memory, and the translation of one into the other. The works in this exhibition encourage the viewer to think about their points of contact with memory and their emotional and aesthetic experiences. The show questions how these points of contact are preserved in our minds and asks the question: is it possible to exist in two places at the same time? Sensory and finite encounters are articulated through the use of the photographic process with space for materiality in the form of sculptures, collages and film.

Jyrki Parantainen - Maa

Gallery TAIK Persons is highly pleased to present Helsinki School artist Jyrki Parantainen with a selection of works from his early series Earth (1989–1991).

Parantainen, who played a key role as to the Helsinki School during its founding years, continues to be one of the School’s driving forces. Always seeking to further his conceptual approaches and working methods in the production of artworks, Parantainen’s creative process has undergone significant transformations throughout his now over twenty-year long career. While older works were dedicated to photography and installation in characteristically large-scale formats, more recent works as shown in the exhibition Between Heaven and Earth (2012) departed entirely from the former medium and testified a new tendency towards small-scale objects.

A continuous red line in Parantainen’s oeuvre is the importance of conceptualization and preparation in producing a new work, both mentally and materially. Critical introspection and methodical accuracy are crucial aspects to this process, which Parantainen likens to writing a script for a film. The implementation of the work reveals itself as a stage on which personal emotional endeavor, precise technique, and perfect timing engage in a forceful intimate dialogue, palpably described by Parantainen as a form of "wrestling”.