Distortion

The works of Sandra Kantanen has always had a strong penchant for the use of painterly elements within her photographic shots. This practice can be seen in her latest series Distortion. This body of work exemplify how Kantanen is able to perfectly balance out colour and light, blurring and brushing, thereby bringing order to the image’s composition. By imitating the photographic process of multiple exposure and inserting digital brush strokes, Kantanen blurs the line between the analogue and the digital to a point where the viewer cannot determine if the artworks true origin lies in photography or not. The flower arrangements, that have been made with large-scale scanners, almost irritate the eye with their sharp hyperrealistic contours. The amount of detail built up the impression of tangibility which is then disturbed by the digital distortions that Kantanen added in afterwards. The wavy motions – that occurred by moving the flowers during the scanning process – recall technical errors. As high-resolution scanners usually do not make these kinds of mistakes, the glitches indicate the artistic intervention that is juxtaposed to the objective scanning itself.