Vanishing Signs

Living in the age of mediated realities, signs and reflections are virtually doubled and doubled. Traditional concept of reality, as something so material we can touch it, has given place, through recent technological advances, to another kind reality: ephemeral flow of digital, visual, virtual. In mediated realities, the crowds of signs or images, are reborn and emptied continuosly.

Reality under contemporary mediated regime? Two things seem to be important for contemporary humans and environments: making an image or brand of oneself, and staying connected. Reflections of images connect with other images.

In my digital collage, letters in a gravestone are falling down and a worn artificial rose from cemetery doubles a reflection of a person. In virtual environment birth and death of the signs can become simultaneous, but also marks that are thought have more eternal existence share, in time, almost same fate. Also letters cut in stone are once falling away.

I am using pieces of public imagery in my collages, because advertisements and media images can be seen as altarpieces of contemporary human being. Banal media scrap tell what people today believe and glorify. My digital collages are made of banal materials, but I still hope they approach real sacred images. Icons, for Eastern Orthodox Christian church, are images that do not stay as mere pictures. They are part of prayer and meditation, images taking the viewer to a more poetic and real reality.

All signs have the same fate of vanishing away, but what survive are the basic questions of being and meaning.




Ulla Karttunen:
Vanishing signs, 2014,
106 x 80 cm,
lambda print mounted in between aluminium and plexiglass