TILA (Passage I)

One of the leading artists of the Helsinki school, a loosely connected group of photographers associated with Finland's Academy of Fine Arts, Kekarainen uses the camera to foreground the process of perception itself. The photographs in his TILA series are images of architectural spaces-rooms, staircases, doorways, windows-to which he has added various optical occlusions: extra shadows, floating spots of color, and larger veils or scrims that sometimes nearly obscure the original image. These interruptions in the visual field complicate the act of seeing and encourage a heightened awareness of the tension between the flatness of the photograph and the illusion of spatial depth. The Finnish word tila means many things, from "space" or "place" to "circumstance" or "state of mind." Kekarainen's gorgeously complex images convincingly show that the photographic representation of space is completed in the eye and mind of the viewer.