Liisa Lounila

Liisa Lounila is interested in surveying melodramatic emotions such as rebellion, the feeling of emptiness, subliminal experiences and the anxiety caused by not reaching these emotions. Her camera-produced works connect performativity to bringing these emotions to life. Instead of presenting her audience a conventional linear narrative in her films, Lounila shows us gestures, memory flashes and details of vanished moments. She is more interested in concentrating on social situations where people are present as active participants as opposed to a role of a mere external observator.

Lounila's films Popcorn (2011), Flirt (2002) and Play>> (2003) are shot with a homemade 360° pinhole camera that allows to take 528 frames at once. Reconstructing these images and playing them in a row creates an illusion of the viewer moving around a frozen subject. Lounila uses this “time-slice” technique in order to separate motion and time from one another, to catch single moments in the flow of the human life.

In addition to lens-based works, Lounila works with oil paintings, textual explorations and sculpture. She has also used glitter to create large-scale images. The latest additions to her oeuvre are silver coated everyday objects. In Two Sugars Would be Great (2011) two coffee cups and a stirring stick form a steely paradox of fast consumerism and the endurance related to art. Stargazing (2011), displaying a worn pair of Converse shoes thickly coated with silver, can also be interpreted as a comment on today’s consumeristic attitudes.

http://liisalounila.com