Opening Talk:
7:00 PM on Monday, July 1 at the Cultural Center
at Rocky Neck, 6 Wonson Street, Gloucester, MA.
Closing Talk:
7:00 PM on Thursday, July 25,
at the Goetemann Residency Studio, 77 Rocky Neck Ave., #10.
Now in its 15th year, the Rocky Neck Art Colony’s Goetemann Artist Residency provides visiting artists with a four-week stay in a live-work studio at the Rocky Neck Art Colony (RNAC) with access to the rich cultural community of Gloucester, MA. The July artist, video artist Eeva Siivonen, will give her opening talk at 7:00 PM on Monday, July 1, at the Cultural Center at Rocky Neck, 6 Wonson Street, Gloucester, MA. Her closing talk is scheduled for 7:00 PM on Thursday, July 25, at the Goetemann Residency Studio, 77 Rocky Neck Ave., #10.
In Siivonen’s moving image work, the physical and sensorial experience of being in a place or a landscape creates subjective voices that are transient and present only through the dialogue between senses and the details of the physical environment. She assumes bodies and identities of observers who wander, rethink, and reinvent themselves constantly through the dialogue between language, image and sound. She looks for the moments of connection when images, words and sounds meet and align—creating, however briefly, a unity of a voice or experience. By playing with the constant tension between the pre-linguistic and ambiguous nature of images and sounds, and the gravity of language defines and creates meanings. Prefering to embrace chaos and the fragile nature of our subjectivities, the constant stream of memories, random thoughts, and associations that collide with the perceptual world around us, keep her viewers in a perpetual state of aimless change and movement.
This illuminates what is small and ephemeral—details, thoughts, and emotions that appear and disappear like fireflies at dusk. Little pieces and traces of thought and experience speak through silence rather than noise. She sutures these together in a visual and sonic space where the overlooked and forgotten become visible and amplified in an effort to create space for attention and empathy.
A video artist, originally from Helsinki, Finland, Eeva Siivonen currently lives in London, Ontario. She earned her BFA and MFA degrees in documentary film directing from Aalto University in Helsinki before moving to the US as a Fulbright Scholar to pursue a second MFA in Video Art from Syracuse University.
Stills from video Strange Places and How to Survive Them
Good Morning Gloucester 