© Jari Silomäki, from the Series My Unopened Letters
© Jari Silomäki, from the Series My Unopened Letters
“In “My Unopened Letters”, Silomäki creates a kind of fictive reality: the tales of a fictive self and network concerning the self’s relationships with other people in the past, present and future. Over the years, he has received letters from different people, which he has left unopened. The letters thus contain countless attempts to contact him, messages from those who wrote them and conceptions of relations between the self of the narrative and the writers. They have all remained clouded in secrecy. The unopened letters are arranged in piles on shelves according to their senders, forming a balanced installation of chromatic beauty, which Silomäki has photographed and printed in large format. This installation is the core of the series. The other small groups of works belonging to the series consist of images depicting situations in the relationships between the writers of the letters and self of the story. They are complemented with text panels commenting on the situations in the images. Jari Silomäki plays with the concepts of document and fiction and their mutual relationship, and the characters of his tales deal with problems and emotions that are true and characteristic of man. In terms of colour, the works are linked through green: the images employ different tones of green lending a kind of distanced, cinematic mood to them.
(from the Anhava Gallery)
To see more of Jari’s work click here.
N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 