Elina Julin
Put Your Shadows Together

05. - 28.10.2012

“Countless layers of thoughts, images and feelings – have in turn – hit your brain as easily as light. One might think that each layer might bury the previous, but nothing is completely lost.”

– Charles Baudelaire

Helsinki Contemporary has the pleasure to open the artist Elina Julin’s exhibition Put Your Shadows Together, which at the same time is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition consists of new photographic works.

Julin is interested in the number of different ways in which our environment influences us. Looking, hearing and sensing are to the artist synonyms. Perceiving with her different senses, to Julin means experiencing the world in a totalizing way, in an interaction between body and soul.

For the works selected for this exhibition, Julin went through her own archives. The works that are now shown are based on pictures that emerged as important during the working process. The works among themselves form a strong world of their own, even though they were originally born in different contexts. Their point of departure is often nature, but the motive of the works is the experience of the surrounding world- a world experienced, lived and sensed. In the new works, there’s still a strong sense of light and of shadowy darkness. In this colour world, we move between nuances of blue, gray, and light yellow. Time is presented in the pictures as a moment in movement. The moment is silent and lingering, but under the surface something is trembling. What – that’s something the artist leaves for the viewer to interpret.

“I see shadows as interesting shapes that are walking beside us. The shadows have their own subconscious dimension, but they are not specifically positive or negative. Perhaps I see, to some extent, the shadows as the choices we make and as parts of our life that follow us, even without our knowledge.” – Elina Julin

Elina Julin (born in 1979 in Ruokolahti) is living and working in Helsinki. Julin graduated in 2010 from Aalto University School of Art and Design as a Master of Art, and she was a finalist in the EMMA Prize competition of photography in 2010. Her previous solo exhibition in Helsinki was held in 2009 at Sinne Gallery. Her works have also been shown in group exhibitions, for example in the group exhibition Sound of Silence at the summer gallery of Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary in Savonlinna in July 2011.

The exhibition has been supported by Grönqvistska stiftelsen, Koneen säätiö and Suomen kulttuurirahaston, Uudenmaan rahasto.