Salla Tykkä
Lasso
9 March  - 15 April 2001

Showing in London for the first time, Finnish artist Salla Tykkä will present a major new film installation at the Delfina Project Space, opening on Thursday 8 March. Lasso, a single screen piece filmed in Finland during the Spring of 2000, is a complex work using the qualities and dynamics of popular cinema to reveal a compelling narrative.
 
Although only 3 minutes in duration, Lasso incorporates a rigorously crafted cinematic sequence which provides the work with a distinctive epic quality. The film reveals its female subject, a jogger, caught in a highly charged, dreamlike sequence as she chances upon an extraordinary spectacle in the suburbs of Helsinki. Within a modernist house a young man is dancing and leaping through the large hoop of a lasso, unaware of the transfixed visitor outside. An accompanying soundtrack by Ennio Morricone - 'Once Upon a Time in the West' - contributes to the allusion of the Wild West conjured by the dress and activity of the young man, a cowboy in the Finnish hinterland. The spell is only broken when the lasso is thrown intently to the ground.
 
Withholding any direct sense of commentary or conclusion, the work contrasts the exterior natural world of the female passer-by with the bourgeois domesticity and masculine activity in which the male subject appears entrapped.