Sandra Kantanen was born in Helsinki, Finland (1974) and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, and at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University Helsinki where she took her MA in photography. She has exhibited internationally, most recently at the Getty Center Los Angeles in the exhibition Convergences; Selected Photographs from the Permanent Collection.
Kantanen speaks of her recent Forest series (on-going since 2016) 'I work with coloured smoke bombs during different seasons. I distort the image surface with long exposures and digital paint. The series is a direct continuation of my earlier work which deals with combining photography and painting. Covering, blurring and streaking the photographs surface questions the idea of the moment in a photograph. When does photography end and become something else? The other issue is of course the landscape. I keep to landscape as a subject ever since studying landscape painting in China. These new works however, are from my backyard, a peninsula in southernmost Finland. Here several wars have been fought and I cannot help to think that also the forest has a memory.’
