Sandra Kantanen
BETWEEN LANDSCAPES
Sandra Kantanen’s works raise questions about the fundamental nature of photography and landscape. At the core of her practice are the interface between the real and the ideal, nature in a state of constant transformation, and the presence of memory within the landscape. Nature appears both as an external and an internal space in which humans and the environment reflect one another. The ephemerality is essential – the continual shift of light and color that renders the landscape an image perpetually in motion.
The beginning of Kantanen’s career coincided with the transition from analog to digital photography. Having started with film and darkroom work, she soon embraced digital tools and, in the early 2000s, developed her distinctive technique that merges the languages of photography and painting. This synthesis involved the fusion of both two media and two visual cultures. Kantanen became acquainted with Chinese landscape painting while studying in Beijing, and her visual thinking draws on Asian landscape traditions and Eastern philosophy. At the same time, her practice operates strongly on a meta-level of photography, engaging with Western art theory and art history.
Through her technique, Kantanen challenges the distinction between photography and painting and emphasizes the active role of the photographer in the process of creating the work. Staged shooting locations, layered images, and digitally manipulated pixels resembling dripping paint underscore the artificial nature of the image and the landscape. The painterly trace transformed into digital distortion functions as a kind of disturbance, interrupting our act of looking and our pursuit of an elusive ideal.
Kantanen’s first major museum exhibition brings together works from the early 2000s to the present day. Many of the series explore photography’s relationship to time and materiality. In Smokeworks, the colored haze of smoke bombs fills the forest like a dreamlike memory; in Distortions, the movement of plants scanned with a flatbed scanner makes the long exposure time visible. Elsewhere, the silence and calmness of the landscapes almost bring time to a standstill. In the expansive Meadows, we can perceive the entire cycle of life – the shared history of humanity and nature. The landscape opens into a meditation on what it means to be in a place, to be present in the world, and to perceive the continuity of time.
Sandra Kantanen (b. 1974, Helsinki) graduated as a photographer from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) in 2003 and studied Chinese landscape painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing in 2001. Today she is one of the best-known photographers of the Helsinki School, whose award-winning works are most often exhibited outside of Finland. Kantanen lives and works in Hanko.