Mikko Rikala | Paradigms of Chance

We are pleased to present "Paradigms of Chance", Mikko
Rikala’s second solo exhibition at Persons Projects that
continues his research into spatiality and temporality
emerging from both philosophical and scientific nature
related thoughts and practices.

The exhibition’s most prolific group of works "A Year in My
Pocket", features photographs that Rikala took over four
seasons from specific places in the Finnish archipelago,
where he focuses on the water in its various seasonal
cycles.

He subsequently prints and folds one photograph for each
season and places it in his pocket, which he then carries
throughout that season. Every so often he would pull out
the trousered photograph to document its transformation
and condition, then place it back into his pocket. Like the
memories we keep in our heads, the image is transformed
over time through its everyday use of being transported
and carried.

Mikko Rikala is an artist who uses the photographic
process as tool for gathering and recording material to
help him in his philosophical pursuit of finding different
ways to explore what’s behind the rational self. Rikala
states, “I’m trying to uncover the relationship between
what is seen as rational on one hand and what is perceived
as irrational on the other.” His work is a reflection that
merges mystical and philosophical thoughts through the
empirical process of observation. Unlike his previous
works, where he used the photographic process to record
the now and then, these new pieces focus on the mysteries
that lie beneath the unseen. He asks, “What are the
possibilities for a person to observe and understand the
world beyond the rational mind?”
Rikala uses his camera as a means for monitoring through
the meditative act of observation in drawing out the
medicinal to the philosophical aspects inherent with the
physical plane of what an object is, be it a plant, rock or
bees hive. He creates visual dichotomies that contrast
opposing world views in how we should be living with
nature as opposed to using technology as a tool to
overpower it.

The works presented in this exhibition are Rikala’s attempt
to remind us that we need to remember those essential
qualities that lie within the natural world beyond their
scientific definitions and within our collective memories. In
Rikala’s world a quartz stone is far more than a hard-
crystalline mineral compound but a talisman for channeling
emotions, healing, calming and cleansing one’s thoughts.

Collectively, these pieces function as psychological bridges
joining the
conscious to the unconscious by looking at our
surroundings through a mystical lens based upon innate
sensibilities. Rikala concludes, “My artistic approach
exercises methods of ‘meditative repetition’ and
patterning, arrangement and decomposition; my work
systematically juxtaposes and breaks up processual,
relative movements of linear and circular time. Structures
of disintegration and decay, as indicators of the inevitable,
progressive passage of time and, likewise transitional
phenomena of recurring, self-renewing characters, as
signifiers of the cyclical and interstitial passage of time, are
elementary themes in my works. Visual motifs are taken
both from the natural and man-made world, man-made
being physically built or conceptual. They coexist as
fragments without structural hierarchy.”