Image: Cecilia Stenbom How To Choose 2012 Single Channel HD Film. Duration: 3 Minutes 31 Seconds, Produced by Third. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
Cecilia Stenbom
Nobody gets out of here alive
7.2 - 2.3 2013
KAAPELIN GALLERIA
Cable Factory
Tallberginkatu 1 C
00180 Helsinki
http://www.kaapelingalleria.fi/en/
Opening: Wednesday 6th February 5-7 pm
Open: Mon 11-17, Tue 11-18, Wed-Fri 11-17, Sat 12-16
Cecilia Stenbom's (b. 1976) solo exhibition Nobody gets out of here alive explores the idea of the impossible quest for a more ordered and less anxious existence, and the perceived dangers inherent in modern life. In the works in the Cable Gallery Stenbom investigates the methods that people use to control their anxiety at a time when fear and chaos are constantly projected into their everyday environment.
Working across media including film and video, installation, drawing and painting, Stenbom examines our anxieties and desires by appropriating and reinterpreting real and fictional scenarios in entertainment, the mass media, retail and domestic life.
A central feature of the Cable Gallery exhibition is How To Choose, a short film about small and seemingly insignificant everyday choices. Guided by a female narrator, the story is written as instructions rather than as personal reflection. Fraught with anxiety about illness, death and other negative outcomes, her decisions are made partly logically and partly following a set of entirely personal rules.
Once we get there it's already over is a series of monochrome drawings on paper of a wide variety of subjects, ranging from shop interiors to lotto numbers and resuscitation drugs. These new works explore the inevitable emptiness of consumer desire.
The paintings in the exhibition are based on images digitally photographed from a television screen showing scenes from a California-based reality-TV show. Taking the characters out of their context allows Stenbom to construct paintings that oscillate between narrative and abstraction.
The Scene, a silent video animation, evokes the effect of diffused coloured light from an emergency-vehicle warning light spilling through a window and moving across a room. This familiar sight, which is as likely to occur in your home as on your TV screen, prompts a poignant moment of reflection that, as with Stenbom's other works, treads a fine line between fiction and reality.
Cecilia Stenbom is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She completed her BA in Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2003 and an MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005. She lives and works in the North East of England. She is currently working on a new commission for the Berwick Film and Media Festival in September 2013. She is a member of AV-arkki (Finland) and her work is represented by Workplace Gallery (UK).
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