A few words with Kristiina Lahde / Adam David Brown...

Kristiina Lahde (KL): I would say that my work focuses on the investigation of materials and process. I typically work with found objects and common-place materials, and seek to re-work them in some way. This often revolves around my altering, cutting or folding and repositioning things to create new physical forms. I think of myself as a sculptor first and foremost. So, even if the work results in a collage, a photograph, or print; for me it relates to sculpture, because it’s about the relationship between the materials and the objects in space.

Adam David Brown (ADB): As a young artist, it quickly became apparent to me that there were many ways of working, one could approach art as a more expanded field, using different materials, different locations and different contexts. I’ve worked with a variety of media throughout my practice, and always as a result of a conceptual framework. I’m influenced by things that I study; language, history, science, astronomy. My projects start with the weaving together of a lot of elements, a lot of codes and things. My job is determining if and how they tie together or come apart. The strategy is usually the same, “less is more…”

ADB: Coincidentally, this residency was one of a couple of collaborative opportunities that have come our way over the past year or so. It’s interesting because for as long as we’ve known each other, Kristiina and I have had individual practices running parallel to one another. So, we were excited and optimistic about this chance to work together.

KL: Yes, it’s been pointed out to us many times over the years that our work is compatible. There are sometimes formal similarities. I think this has to do with our shared artistic influences and the fact that both of our practices have roots in conceptual art.

ADB: We also share a certain reductive, or minimal approach in the way we work. So, when we ask ourselves, “How low can you go?” we’re bound to come up with something that is as articulate and spare as possible.

KL: We were drawn to the idea of working with our fingerprints because they are literally representative of each of us individually. That was our starting point. We were also interested in the intimacy of touch; the mark, the overlapping of the finger prints and the smallness of gesture. Through abstraction, shifts of scale and layering, it was our intention to broaden how these marks could be understood as being elements within something larger, like ripples on water, or magnetic waves or the cycles of the moon…
As artists, we both want our work to connect with others, we like to open up familiar forms so that people can look at them differently and also bring their own reference points to them.

ADB: We meditated on the notion of ‘influence’, and we quickly determined that it would largely define our approach to this project – ‘influence’ as both a conceptual and physical impression, pertaining to distinctive marks, and their relation with each other. A mark made is singular, but when you place another similar mark on top, especially when we’re dealing with fingerprints, you get quadrilaterals, cross-hatching and other new patterns that emerge. What seemed to develop was a discourse. Not just between the opposition or combination of our unique fingerprint forms, but a discourse that takes place across a group of prints made of intersecting marks, which go beyond the edge of any one composition to intersect with another.

KL: And for us, the notion of touch was also something that we wanted to valorize post-Covid. ‘Touch’ and contact are currently something that societies are in the process of re-negotiating.

KL: Yes, it was important. There are a few variations of layering and patterning that developed through the experimentation process, but we realized early on that it would be conceptually essential to integrate both mine and Adam’s up-scaled fingerprints.

KL: I’ve worked with Laine for a number of years now with the printing of independent projects, but never done anything with silkscreen before. And of course, when you work with Laine, you are working with a Master printmaker. So it was all really amazing.

ADB: Time and time again, we’ve come to Laine with our ideas and then he contributes a translation of those ideas into print, with all the technical problem solving required to produce the work as well. Laine is an artist himself too, so he knows how to speak the ‘art language’. –
He is able to facilitate the creation of an idea through a kind of mechanical framework. Whereas, for us the notion that, “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” is a touchpoint that we’ve adopted from Sol LeWitt. It became so fitting, as this is exactly what began to happen during our process in residence. You make your fingerprints, scan them, enlarge them, shoot the screen, wash the screen, print it, and when you are done, you get a mark on the paper. On a conceptual level, this mechanical way of working together suits us very well.

KL: It’s something to do with the physical body. When you’re standing in front of a work that references the body it feels like it has to have a certain scale, otherwise the work might seem too polite or doesn’t have the kind of impact that we wanted these pieces to carry. Seeing as fingerprints are typically experienced at a fairly intimate scale, the vast increase in the size of a fingerprint serves to abstract and reposition them as a subject.

ADB: At this size, the overlapping and layering of the imagery lent itself to the fingerprints producing patterns and lines that appear to connect and intersect; taking on the appearance of tracks, or highways moving across aligned compositional fields.

ADB: Working with fingerprints seemed like Ground Zero in a sense. They are a kind of mark or print that almost everyone knows. They’re on everybody’s phone, everybody’s screen…and though most people probably wouldn’t recognize their own fingerprint, it is a singular and identifying mark. A fingerprint visually signifies your unique identity.
Historically, representations of touch, The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo for example, have signified contact with the supernatural, or the magical on some level. All of these ideas and associations became available for our exploration too.

KL: The medium of print and analog printmaking aligns itself so well to the fingerprint. The ability to overlap our ideas of influence and intent through the physical layering of imagery by the hand.

ADB: At its core, this work is about influence. Things take influence to be put into motion or stopped, be it the influence of gravity throughout the cosmos, ripples on the pond, or of each to another…

KL: It’s to do with connection and interconnectivity rather than singular identity. It’s not about a signature, or me, or us. It’s about translating something intimate and personal into a larger framework.