Juuso Noronkoski

Visual artist Juuso Noronkoski is FCINY’s and Triangle Art Association’s artist-in-residency in March – May 2017. Noronkoski works with mixed-media installations combining photographs, video, sculpture and text. He is fascinated by the demarcation between images, objects and written language: how each individual means of expression with differing temporal and material qualities contributes to the common conversational space. 

Noronkoski mainly uses photography to convey something that exists beyond textual mapping. Yet, sometimes it is words that draw the image more clearly than light could ever manage. The short stories he writes are meant to create an image of a thought process that has lead to the creation of the physical artwork. At the same time the writing works as an invitation to contemplate the relation of the physical artwork to its spatial and temporal surroundings and as well to writing itself.

"Why is it that words tend to disappear when one tries to delve into the trenches and memory holes of sleep? They say seeing comes before words, but what about dreams, and other vistas we behold with our eyes closed? Can such images exist without verbal thought?"

-From ‘This Place is Nowhere’ by Juuso Noronkoski

By combining the physical presence of an object with a photographic image, Noronkoski aims to bridge the gap between here and there. The photographs function not only as windows to another time and place, but as mirrors that reflect actuality back to the viewer. If his artistic practice would impose a question, it would be: what, or rather, where is an image?

During his residency in New York Noronkoski continues to work with a recent body of work of his called ‘This Place Is Nowhere’. He’s planning to exhibit variations of this work in two solo shows come autumn in Tokyo, Japan, and Helsinki, Finland.