Liisa Lounila
Artist
Liisa Lounila was the first artist selected for the new 6-month-long residency program created in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program. She stayed at the Manhattan Avenue apartment, Brooklyn, January-June 2012. This was her third longer stay in New York. In March 2012, Lounila participated in VOLTA NY, an invitational show of solo artists' projects, and the American incarnation of the fair focusing on contemporary art, founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 2005.
Lounila switches between traditional oil painting, painting with glitter, drawing, creating neon sculptures, and working with video. The latest addition to her oeuvre are the silver and palladium coated everyday objects. Lounila's films Popcorn, Flirt and Play>> have received international acclaim. In 2003, she represented Finland in the Devil-may-care group exhibition organized at the Nordic Pavillion during the 50th Venice Biennale.
Lounila makes images at the threshold between photography and cinematography. In her work, performativity is connected to an interest in a single moment, and to bringing that moment to life. Instead of presenting a conventional linear narrative in her films, Lounila shows her audience gestures, memory flashes and details of vanished moments. She has done a series of films shot with a homemade device that creates the bullet time effect, giving the impression of a camera moving through a space frozen in time. The homemade 360° pinhole camera, on the other hand, used for shooting some of her films was built to allow her to recreate three-dimensional scenes through the filmic medium.
