Juha Mäki-Jussila – Suddenly Last Summer

Human behaviour – plants perform a jungle of human relations on the big screen

As the autumn turns to winter, the Takkahuone Gallery in Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum presents Juha Mäki-Jussila’s video work Suddenly Last Summer. The name refers to Tennessee Williams’ play, Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), which is set in a jungle-like garden. Williams’ play is a rough depiction of relationships, abuse and cruelty.

In the video version shown in Takkahuone, actors have been replaced with animated plants that perform fragments from the original dialogue of the play. The humane plants cite lines from the script of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), a movie version directed by Joseph L. Mankiewiczi. In the
jungle we catch glimpses of, among others, a surgeon who specializes in lobotomies, a wealthy but vicious widow, her degenerate poet son Sebastian and a young female cousin with amnesia. Mäki-Jussila does not refer to Williams’ play through its plot but by portraying subjective sensations. The plot is in fact missing in the video work, allowing the themes of the play to blossom and wither in a random order.

Mäki-Jussila’s work in Takkahuone also serves as a follow-up documentary on the Finnish summer which fades as quickly as it flourished. Suddenly Last Summer is a single-channel video work with animation technique for which the artist filmed the budding and growth of plants in the spring and
summer of 2011 in Karkkila and the Åland Islands. A frame-by-frame technique was used with specialized close-ups. In the animation, single frames pulsate quickly one after another, thereby setting the picture into rhythmical motion.

In an insightful way, Mäki-Jussila has discovered human features in the growing patterns of plants. The tall and mighty blade oozes with confidence whereas the small and round cherry shivers worriedly. Onions chatter in a cheery crowd and the daisies, whether in bloom or fading, set the
mood for reminiscing about the past summer. The horizontally placed rose stem ingeniously captures movement and rapid change in time and space.

Juha Mäki-Jussila (born 1967) lives and works in the town of Karkkila. He has studied at the Orivesi College of Arts, the Nordic Art School in Kokkola and the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, from which he graduated in 1997. Mäki-Jussila has participated in several international
and national video festivals such as the Euronight '06 Nuit Blanche, An All Night Contemporary Art Thing in Toronto, Canada (2006), The Independent Film Festival of Boston, USA (2005) and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennal, Japan (2003). The artist has also held solo exhibitions in Finland and
participated in many group exhibitions in Finland and abroad.

In his works, Mäki-Jussila uses moving picture in varying forms from tape to installation. The works are characterized by a peculiar fascination with humanity. References to motion picture history are also present in Mäki-Jussila’s studies. In his recent works, he has applied stop motion
animation technique to create a kind of “movement of an illusion” instead of an illusion of movement.