“Reverence of Flow (in Motion)”
Jaanika Peerna works at the crossroads of digital and traditional media, often dealing with the themes of water, simplicity and silence.
“I look for the universal beneath the particular and for the particular above the universal,” Peerna says. “In my video work I point my camera towards carefully chosen ordinary phenomena such as water moving around a rock or a reflection on a car and record long takes without moving the camera in the hope that something essential about the subject matter reveals itself. I study the footage closely by slowing it way down and at times reversing it. I try looking at it upside down or sideways, all this in order to end up with a video which conveys something essential about the subject matter at hand. I am after the essence of things, the inner movement reflected in the outer motion. Often a small shift in how things are represented can bring a fresh and more immediate way to see and experience the ordinary things around us. I am interested in the never ending process of becoming with no story, no beginning, no end—just the current moment in flux.”
Reverence of Flow in Motion (2009) depicts a moving ball of water and light upon the screen. What is it? A distant imaginary planet seen from outer space? A rushing stream viewed through a round hole in a log? A synthetic fractal landscape? None and all of the above, a work composed by the artist’s gaze in tandem with the transformative possibilities of the machine. We tend to see only what our technologies offer to us, but sometimes, we peek through, past image and reflection, to some truer world beyond.
