The Anatomy of Landscape

Recording a landscape as a photograph is easy, yet also impossible. A landscape is too vast an experience to be captured onto a small rectangular surface. The Anatomy of Landscape is a photographic series, in which the artist Ilkka Halso has approached his experience of this difficulty from another angle, by finding new ways of exposing the landscape and its structures. In a very concrete form, Halso deconstructs the landscape and its concept through focussing his eye on thin layers within its profile.

Ilkka Halso slices and cuts the landscape into biopsies, making cross-sections with a figurative scalpel. Even though the subject matter is the landscape, his images also speak of humans and their need to control and adjust the environment, including their perception and experience of it. Via an almost clinical approach the landscape becomes the material of the so called "scientific man’s” ways of perceiving and parsing nature.

The views in Ilkka Halso’s photographs are artificially lit from above in the darkness. Using a remote-controlled multicopter, flashlights are freely moved above the landscape, highlighting boundless details. From each location hundreds of frames of material are recorded, constituting massive amounts of data that can be manipulated in at least as many different ways.