Crunch time 2.0

Time is going by so quickly! I am just working like mad to make sure I have all the press releases, images, posters and invites ready to go for my exhibition at Louhitalo in July. The text underneath a poster mock up is from my exhibition info sheet. I will get around to translating it in to english soon hopefully, but that is not quite on the list of my personal priorities. The art work is coming along and work on the communal artwork with local jr.High students and elderly is also progressing though not as quickly as i would have hoped. This week i need to finalize the invites, poster and press release. Send off the contracts and start sussing out printing costs for the large photographs.  I need more caffeine just thinking about it. 

Kysymykset kuka olen ja mistä tulen ovat Anna Puhakan “Karjalasta nyt ja ennen” näyttelyn pääaiheina. Näyttelyssä Puhakka tutkii omaa suhdettaan ja obsessiotaan hänen esi-isiensä kotipaikkaa, Karjalaa kohti. Nykyaikaisena maailmankansalaisena, joka on asunut yli puolet elämästään ulkomailla, Puhakka palaa töissään suvunsa juurille Karjalaan, maailmaan jossa hän on oppi uimaan, tuntemaan metsän salat ja uskomaan loitsun, sanan ja luonnon voimaan.

Näyttelyn kautta Puhakka luo esihistoriansa uudelleen; korjaillen omaa eksistentialista kriisiään ihmisenä joka ei ole koskaan kuuluunut kunnolla minnekkään. Teoksissa Puhakka muuntautuu ylipapittareksi joka hallitsee sielujen synty sanoja, kasvattaa metsän ja puhuu muinaisten äänillä. Kietoen perinteisen Karjalaisen kansanuskon ja muovaillen sen uuteen kuvitteelliseen maailmaan Puhakka kuiskaa ja vastaa tuuleen kysymyksillä: Kuka olen? Mistä tulen?

“Karjalasta nyt ja ennen” näyttely on osa Anna Puhakan suurempaa tutkimustyötä nimeltään Kyllä Tunnen Syntymäsi, jossa hän tutkii muinaista Karjalaista kansanuskoa ja kehitää erilaisia tapoja ja menetelmiä tutkia sen näkyvyyttä nykypäivässä: rituaaleina, tarinoina, musiikkina ja perinteenä, tuoden sen nykypäivään mediataiteen avulla.

Puhakka (s.1983 Tampere) on elämänsä aikana asunut Suomessa, Yhdysvalloissa, Australiassa, Ranskassa ja Englannissa. Hän valmistui Sunderlandin Ylipistosta 2007 ja on työskennellyt taiteilija kansainvälisesti siitä lähtien. Puhakka on myös kuukausittain ilmestyvän HESA inprint luovan taidelehden päätoimittaja ja kurattori. Tällä hetkellä Puhakka asuu ja työskentelee Helsingissä.

KAIHO, 2012

Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin'

"PREY"

It is almost wondrous. I am not stressed, though the thought of not being stressed makes me feel stressed, because I feel like I'm forgetting something, so who knows what's going on... in any case still working on the images I took a few weeks ago playing around with photo shop and cursing my computer for being slow and then apologising to it when it threatens to crash.

Winter persists, even with the spring sun it is cold. Next week I’m off to Amsterdam to see my mom who lives there. Can't wait to walk on ground that is not iced. Sit, write, look and listen.

Space gold and Self-portrait as a crooner and Cat

PJ Harvey is rapping. Not in any true sense, but because my computer is slowly dying suddenly her Big Exit has become a constellation of stutters. My tooth aches with the feeling. Soon I will get a new computer, soon all the work will happen so smoothly that I won't have a chance to enjoy this Left eye PJ.

I cant believe i've had this old PC (laptop) for what must be almost eight years.  The specs of this current laptop are 512Mb RAM, 60Gb hard drive and 800Mhz amd processor. Which even I realise are crap by today’s standards. Still it lets me work with images and sometimes if I am very patient video. What can I say I’m a sucker for vintage.

gold 6

 So anyways, I am having a wonderful week or couple to be honest! I am in the zone and can't keep up with the ideas. Work is coming so quickly that it feels me giddy in its wake with a luscious creation orgasm. So here is some of the over-splay of stuff that I’m working on. This is part of the self-portrait “painting” mini performance to camera and video sect of work.

I am also working on a massive outside sculpture idea. But more on that later....

Painting

Last night I was playing around with my face paints and the notion of what constitutes a painting or a good self-portrait. I see most of my work as paintings even if the outcome is an installation or possibly a soundscape. In this case the paintings are constructed from miniature performances to camera. Here are four self-portraits of many more that I have yet to edit.

Some old sketches I found

 

 

 

 

Rounding up the usual suspects or subjects and Katajanokka in winter

Helsinki Ice Swimmer

The short version to sum-up since the last post: stress, stress, stress, sing, drink, laugh, de-stress, sleep, read and application, application, application, stress, stress, stress.

The long version to sum-up since the last post: Ok so another couple weeks of busyness are behind me and as much as I wish all the busyness was a result of making art, that just would not be the truth. We had the one year celebration of the existence of HESA inprint magazine, which came and went in good order and happy frame of mind and well a lot of residual stress of organising an event. The same happy event collided with Tristan’s first gig and I must say we did pretty good. Paid work is also picking up speed with many more events for me to orchestrate I am quite tired but at least I have enough money to buy materials for the art I plan to make next week.

Ice

Next week I’ll be bringing out my trusty old watercolours to start sketching some ideas I’ve been having for the “big” project. Mainly I was planing to, sketch how I’d like the space to look and feel, but who knows what will happen. I've also been playing around with some texts for the work that I have been asked to do for the up-coming exhibitions.


So until then here are some pictures from a wintry Helsinki.

Taking on the new year

Last takeout, 2011

                                                                         

It has been a while since my last blog entry. With the holidays, magazines to edit, music to make, meetings to attend, work and research not to mention another batch of proposal writing, its been a hectic sometimes manic 3-4 weeks. I have also been cigarette and alcohol free since the Jan 1st 2012 and while the alcohol is no issue, the cigarette cravings are ravaging my senses and making me utterly impossible with emotional control. So, a lot more drama then I'm used to in the past week. Its almost like turning back in to a teenager. Uncontrollable urges, rage, confusion and well anything you can think of including total body image craziness and fear that I am in short, a talentless loser. Insane how a little puff of smoke has been a shield in a way. I know it is stupid, but hey that’s what it feels like at the moment.

I have however managed to get a lot of work done, the need to be busy constantly to forget about smoking is definitely like an upper. Eevi and I met up before her trip to Argentina to make some final decisions about the community project we will be doing in the summer in Eno. This means a lot of ground work which needs to get done in the next two months. I will be primarily in charge of getting the people together, sorting out timetables with everyone and doing the preliminary proposal to finance the project which Eevi will then edit, do some mock-ups of what the works might look like and well hopefully, Bobs your uncle and we get funding.

After our meeting where I discussed meeting my mothers uncle, Antti. He is 80 and grew up in Lumivaara on Lake Ladoga (Laatokka) in the republic of Karelia. I began envisioning how the documentary will flow, it is very exciting to get some coherent storyline in to my head and on paper something which has the bones to build meat on. Antti (my great uncle) has a vast amount of photographs from the little island on Ladoga from before the evacuation in to mainland Finland during the war and more stories. It is nice to meet a part of my family which seems to be as interested in storytelling as I am. Antti and his wife Mailis have invited me to their house in Turku for a weekend to look through the photographs, to interview them freely, to ask anything I want and to get to know my somewhat estranged relatives (my grandmother died before I was born and we didn't see much of Antti and his family).

I am having some difficulty in finding video camera equipment good quality enough to rent at a reasonable price and am starting to think that it will in fact be easier, cheaper and also practical for me to buy an HD camera which I can then use for other projects as well. Sound equipment I have found but I do feel I need to find a better quality microphone still. I should be able to rent this through MUU ry.

I sang my second lament in the sauna on Christmas day. It was about the past year and everything that has happened. It felt invigorating, empowering and like the wood that surrounded me hugged and somehow melded with me, forgave me. My next meeting with the members of Äänellä Itkijät ry is on January 22^nd. I hope to be able to better commune with individual members and also to suggest an idea I’ve been brewing for a few weeks now on how to approach the recording process. It would be a way to surround-sound the voices and potentially harmonise the laments be they of the same thing or different.