SAVE THE DATE!!
A warm welcome to the opening of my solo exhibition 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬, 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐫
Thursday, May 7, 5–7 PM at gallery Hippolyte
@hippolytegallery
Yrjönkatu 8-10 courtyard, 00120 Helsinki
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Sofia Okkonen’s exhibition Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviour, consisting of staged photographs, presents an anonymous, fully painted nude female figure. Isolated within a photographic studio, the woman is positioned against simple, saturated fields of colour as well as technical surfaces and equipment. The body appears heavy, often reclined and passive. When active, the figure’s actions are directed towards herself, performed for her own sake, or focused on posing.
In the exhibition at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, decorative buttercream cakes, frames, a quad bike, knives, snakes, a drone and a massage chair also play their own roles. Through these elements, Okkonen explores the interrelations between desire, superficiality, aggression and melancholy.
Aesthetically, Okkonen draws on the expertise gained through her work and in directing models within fashion photography. At the same time, she blurs the boundary between photography and painting by further processing her photographs on paper. Okkonen explores how different types of paper, the scanning process, and the effects of spontaneous stains and creases alter the nature and interpretation of the photograph—like painting with a dirty brush.
The works in the exhibition are based on an interest in capturing a figure trapped within itself, yet blind to its own shadows, and the dim atmosphere it produces. The exhibition is underpinned by reflections on the alternation between superficial self-sufficiency and self-loathing vulnerability. The friction and close oscillation between these two opposing forces appear as a way of being in the world, as physical sensations and as a condition: lovelessness arising from a hunger for love. The exhibition and the artist’s work have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), the Olga and Vilho Linnamo Foundation, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
@taikegram @kulttuurirahasto @linnamonsaatio 🙏💝
