HIPPOLYTE STUDIO
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki
09 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–16
3 June - 1 July 2011
MAIJA BLÅFIELD
Beautiful
The photographic series Beautiful and the video work If I Were Buried at a Street Corner are both about seeing things a little bit differently, which is what the experience of beauty in everyday life often is all about.
The pictures in Beautiful are glimpses, visions and revelations. They are observations of another reality which is revealed momentarily to the lucky viewer in the midst of some mundane aesthetic environment, glimpsed in a shopping centre, on asphalted street, on a motorsports park or a landfill.
If I Were Buried at a Street Corner was shot last autumn during a HIAP residency in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. An abandoned tombstone provided the starting point for the observation of an unfamiliar setting. The city appears in the work as an empty landscape, seen from an outsider's perspective. The hierarchy, utility and logic of the surroundings are sidelined, when monuments can found in the backyard. Thanks for the inspiration to Mr and Mrs Dreher. The sound design is by Olli Huhtanen.
The production of the works in the exhibition was supported by AVEK and the Arts Council of Finland.
Maija Blåfield (b. 1973) is a Helsinki-based visual artist and filmmaker. She works with documentary moving images and photography, exploring the ambiguities of reality. She earned a Master's degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2004.
Her work has previously featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Kluuvi Gallery of the Helsinki Art Museum, Kunsthalle Helsinki, as well as group exhibitions in Finland and abroad, at film festivals and on television.Information and press images:
Hippolyte Studio, +358 9 612 33 44, info[at]hippolyte.fi
(c) Maija Blåfield
