2011 Bringing Down the Walls. Galleria KONE, Hämeenlinna

This exhibition means to examine cultural notions of place by deconstructing and re-contextualizing images and objects that reflect or influence the collective imagination.

When historical truth collapses, the collective memory has to re-create its contents.

Bringing Down the Walls bridges the use of physical space as metaphor with the construction/deconstruction process of identity building. By working in a variety of artistic media these works intend to investigate the reprocessing of memory and the complexity of location and identity. The story of a space can be traced through its emergent life, its life in construction, its life in use and reuse, its life in individual and collective memory and its life within a culture, suggesting that, while spaces can contain many lives, they can equally live many lives themselves. They mirror the process of how memory is formed, therefore mirroring the process by which we construct beliefs about ourselves and our pasts.

The intended works will deliberately invite multiple interpretations, not only focusing on the sites themselves, but also on their stories, which express a particular memory (or create it). This approach is especially useful if one assumes that there is no single, universal valid interpretation, but that different groups interpret history differently and consequently construct different memories.

There Goes the Neighbourhood a series of paintings on photographs proposes to investigate the love-hate relationship I have with these houses and the sprawling communities they create. Through painterly intervention, I intended to pay homage to these structures present and past that have literally housed thousands. The resulting brightly coloured blocks or voids will reference the architecture of the original structures but also turn them into visual icons, no longer hidden in the landscape.