Parrot Quarter, Helsinki

Invitation to the exhibition
The invitation with its quotations opens up like a map.
The reference text for the exhibition was a short story on cartography by Jorge Luis Borges.
The town planning map was the theme of my exhibition in Gallery Valööri in Helsinki. The gallery was located at Annankatu 22 in the Parrot Quarter of the inner city, for which I obtained the map showing the local detailed plan.
I made photos of the quarter and its courtyards. Views of the streets surrounding the quarter were transferred as silhouetted motifs to the large-scale paintings, and views of the courtyards to smaller paintings.
I worked on the map: in a way, I created a new plan by aligning the streets with grid north. The result was two intersecting grid plans and a number of map excerpts which I copied on to the paintings, together with the map symbols.
I strove to create the impression of a surface worn by time and of painted icons, as echoes of the city’s past during the czarist times. Parallel to this, I included the contemporary street layer, the ubiquitous street barriers and airborne dust. The materials used include gold paint, sand and fragments of reflexive material from traffic signs. The surfaces were worked on with a band sander.
In addition to the exhibition, I arranged an installation of street barriers in front of the gallery building. This consisted of scrapped street barriers with deformed legs. I had the metal legs nickel-plated in a shade of gold, and the wooden horizontals I coated with sand. These barriers to movement were transformed into quasi-animate passers-by or guard dogs for the exhibition.
View of the large paintings in the exhibition. The wavy layers of wax on the surface of the paintings are a reference to contour lines, not visible in the map. I used a clothes iron to mould the hot wax surface.
View of the small paintings in the exhibition.
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 1, 1997, sand, traffic sign, wax and oil on linen, 115 x 165 cm
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 2, 1997, sand, wax and oil on linen, 115 x 165 cm
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 3, 1997, sand, traffic sign, wax and oil on linen, 115 x 165 cm
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 2, detail: contour lines on wax surface.
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 1 and 3, details
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 4-6, 1997, sand, traffic sign, wax and oil on linen, different heights, width 36 cm
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 7-11, 1997, sand, traffic sign, wax and oil on linen, different heights, width 36 cm
Kaisa Soini, Parrot Quarter 12-15, 1997, sand, traffic sign, wax and oil on linen, different heights, width 36 cm