A Game of Rods and Cones

In her exhibition A Game of Rods and Cones, Sirpa Heikkinen focuses on the most dominant of our senses, the vision. There are two types of light-responsive visual receptor cells located in the retina of the eye: the rods and the cones. The cones tap the colours of our consciousness, unique to each sense, and the rods rake a possible grip on the light. Through experimental photography, Sirpa Heikkinen wants to remind the viewer of the origin of the history of photography, when the image-making process was slower and the flood of images quieter. In her work, Heikkinen has used a traditional enlarger, meant for photo development, from which she has moved on to hand-coloring the prints. The colorful cardboards seen in the lobby gallery bounce as additional stimuli when they collide with the white walls and grotesquely blotchy prints. The works in the exhibition have been realized in darkrooms both in Rovaniemi and Turku.