Cunei Media interviews Ville Kansanen
We had a few minutes to chat with Los Angeles based multimedia artist Ville Kansanen about the unrealized potential of digital media, frustration with current trends in photography and his compositional process.
Cunei Media: What drew me to your work was some of the anxious or isolated feelings that you evoke from your images. Is that your intention with your art?
Ville Kansanen: Well I certainly don’t sit around thinking what would be an anxious picture. Things sometimes turn out that way because I have a tendency and a need to get that kind of emotion out of myself. I think my work represents a self trapped inside myself. The self that realizes that we get by lying to ourselves and that we are really alone in our own minds. Of course, this is just my self.
CM: I hear that. Do you have a certain process that you go through when creating your images?
VK: I’ll get fixated on a sentence in my mind and instead of completing it with words, I will complete it with a picture. I’m a terrible artist really, I don’t sit around and sketch much because my sensibilities won’t let me do anything unfinished but I’m trying to fix that because it is obviously a good tool to make concepts and ideas better. I’m trying to relax.
Anyway, for most work I will create a very detailed “shot list” of every frame with at least rudimentary sketches and choreography. I need to know exactly what I am doing before I start taking photographs. The shot list, or sketch paper, if you will, will have militaristic orders in it about the simplest things because I’m easily overloaded and anxious with distractions during shooting. I actually find the photography part extremely uncomfortable and will try to get out of it at the last minute, if I possibly can… Of course, I never really do, I wouldn’t forgive myself for that. Am I answering your question at all? So, when the photos are done, I will stay away from them, completely ignore them for at least a couple of days normally. I’ll be too involved with meaningless details if I don’t do that. After I call the picture “finished” I will give it something I call the “one hour stare”. I’ll simply stare at it until I find all the things I want to fix in it and I’ll make note of them. I’ll leave the work alone again for a while and come back to fix it with a more sensible and clinical attitude, sometimes I even sign, date, and number the piece before actually finishing it.
The post-production is a religious thing for me… I will cry like a baby even if I’ll be working on Photoshop, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same crafting for me. I think that’s when I feel so blessed to be changing reality in that minute way. Having my small piece of control over all the madness. The whole process of creating an image, is forgiving myself, over and over. I’m a junky for that small moment of relief I get out of it. Sometimes though, I’ll just make something out of whimsy without any planning or thinking at all, and that can be extremely fun at times.
CM: I can identify with that. Are you currently working on anything new?
VK: I’m making sculptural work out of wood. They are still in process, I don’t what their exact idea is yet. I’m exploring the similarities between organic forms in correlation with similarities between the socio-psychological experiences of human beings. In short, I cannot shake the patterns I see everywhere in nature and in the minute human social behavior. How trees and rocks form the same way as other biological and geological objects and entities, and how we (people) all create a formal pattern in our behavior and motivations regardless of what our backgrounds are. It’s a strange universality that pops in and out. I’m immensely fascinated by it.
In terms of technique, I’m stepping outside of photography even more than before and am trying to perfect a certain technique of transferring digital prints onto unprintable materials. I’m also continuing work on antique photographs and the mounts they are glued on. They are like a treasured object and I find myself being a witty rat bastard when I put, what people treat as recyclable and worthless: the digital image, onto something like an antique mount board with old studio signatures and addresses. There is a craft in digital photography that artist should embrace even if it has been largely ruined by idiots, who go around attaching wings onto babies and creating ridiculous photo manipulations of women being half human and half cat, or whatever else these buffoons are up to. It should be un-crutched from the mediocre photographer and embraced as a real and separate medium. I’m not seeing that happening at all.
CM: It sounds like you have a distaste for some of the “abuse” of digital technologies. Can you explain your perception of the difference between misuse and proper use of digital media?
VK: I don’t want to presume to know what is proper and what is not. I’m just kind of saddened by the way that especially the fine art world is so conservative that there’s no real exploration or spearheading done in digital media. I’m talking more about photography than anything else because I work in that realm. Most of the work out there is limited to “the rules” of photography. I don’t care if it looks good or not, or if it has a fantastic concept or not. I just think there’s a way to utilize digital photography in a way that is inherently and only possible in digital photography. Emulating film photography or reducing digital photography to parlor tricks should be cut out. That does nothing to advance photography or art.
I think artists and teachers alike should be concentrating on shaking off the idea that digital photography is only for commercial use or for low-brow Internet art. I think it’s a responsibility that photographers should be taking. I hear a lot of artists talk about digital media in a derogatory manner but almost ten out of ten times they are too lazy or uninformed to delve into its opportunities. I hear them complain about how easy, cheap, and recycled it is when in actual fact I think they feel threatened because of the technical ease of creating images that are painstaking technical ordeals in the film medium. I think it’s foolish and childish. Digital photography needs a Jerry Uelsmann or a Man Ray to explore the digital limits beyond the aesthetic look, feel, and concepts of film photography. It needs to be pushed away from being trapped in film photography just like photography was pushed away from painting. We live in transitional times and I’m an impatient man, I know.
CM: This is true. Do you find music to be an influence on your art? If so, what music do you find inspirational?
VK: Certainly, music is my biggest inspiration I think. I have love affairs with certain albums or artists for periods of time. For instance I could not shoot a photo or work on anything unless I could hear some Warren Ellis and Nick Cave while doing it. Their score for The Assassination of Jesse James is spectacular. Back home in Finland I used to go to locations with a chair and listen to Amon Tobin until I would figure out what to photograph there. I could spend whole days or MP3 player batteries doing that.
CM: Okay, last one. Do you have any upcoming shows that you’d like to mention? If so, what will you be showing?
VK: Not right now. I’ve taken a pretty conscious decision to create some more whole bodies of work before tackling the galleries again. I’m also trying to be more careful about where I try to put my work in which is pretty vital here in LA. I’m an all eggs in one basket type of guy; most just call me crazy or stupid. Anyway, there is, however, a very interesting and inspirational magazine out of San Fransisco called Descry Magazine, that my work was featured in recently. I recommend people to look that up. They are doing great work with bringing out new artists, who have trouble fitting into the norm, so skipping a couple Starbucks’ and supporting what they do would be a good deed.
Check out Ville’s site for more of his work.
