Uncanny Motions: Facing Death, Morphing Life

When visiting an exhibition of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck’s (1862–1946) paintings and drawings in May 2012, I suddenly felt that I was faced with a ghost. Strolling in the Villa Gyllenberg Art Museum in Helsinki and pondering on the exhibition title Helene Schjerfbeck: Spirituality in Art, my viewing experience was interrupted or, rather, radically transformed.¹ Gazing at the series of self-portraits that Schjerfbeck is most famous for as an artist, made during the final years of her life, I encountered a frame that, in lieu of a painting, featured a video loop: an animated rendition of Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits that merged thirteen works into an apparently seamless unfolding of the artist’s different ages, her face transforming from that of an eighteen-year-old to that of an eighty-three-year-old (figures 1 and 2). Whereas the artist’s paintings and drawings hanging on the walls of this art gallery, engaged in the commemoration of her work and the times that had passed, the video—titled Metamorphosis and running as a fifty-second loop—seemed to bring the dead artist alive, over and over again.²

Watching the silent video, we first see a serious young girl’s profile with a glassy eye, pouty lips, and soft hair. With the computer graphics technique of morphing, the girl’s face transforms into another face—or, rather, the same face but in a later phase of life—with a smooth, apparently seamless transition. As the video

Figure 1.

Interior of Helene Schjerfbeck: Spirituality in Art (February 2–May 20, 2012), Villa Gyllenberg (Helsinki, Finland). Courtesy of Villa Gyllenberg.

Figure 2.

Metamorphosis, Villa Gyllenberg (Helsinki, Finland). Courtesy of Villa Gyllenberg.

progresses, the young woman appears in color—a black crayon drawing has transformed into an oil painting—as a face with blue eyes, red lips, and rosy cheeks. As the young woman is transformed into an older version of herself, the pose, style, coloring, and distance from the viewer change. As a viewer, one is focused on alternating details: wide eyes with heavy eyelids, half-open lips, and different hairstyles. As the video unfolds, the face begins to resemble a skull: the features become blurred and simplified, the jawline becomes more prominent, and the hollow eyes and the mouth stand out in the pale face. This sense of abstraction, reduction, and distortion continuously intensifies; the face becomes increasingly distorted. Eventually one sees a skull, a green-gray figure barely visible against gray background, with eyes and half-open mouth as black holes. The film ends with a charcoal drawing reminding us of what once was a human face.³ Concluding with a black frame and a quote by the artist, "Oh, I wish I had a full life ahead—to paint," as well as her signature, the video frames itself both as a further artwork by Schjerfbeck, a compendium of the whole of her oeuvre, and as a living portrait. Regularly the video starts anew, running as a loop.

The video exhibited at Villa Gyllenberg was aptly titled Metamorfoosi (Metamorphosis), evoking the classic work by Ovid, Metamorphoses, and its key trope of shape shifting: transformations from human through inanimate object to animal and back to human. The video was produced for and by the neighboring Didrichsen Art Museum, where it has been displayed in 2006, 2009, and again 2013 but with a different title, Morfologia (Morphology), intended to emphasize the technology used in the video.⁴ Metamorfoosi/Morfologia is a reedited version of a video originally produced in 2000 by the Finnish Science Centre Heureka with the title Helene—Taiteilijan elämänkaari (Helene—Life of an Artist). At Heureka, the video served as one of the technological attractions (the process of morphing was an innovative technology at that time) in a larger exhibition on the stages of human life, Minä ja sinä—Seikkailu itsessämme (Me and You—An Adventure in Ourselves). Encountering Helene—Life of an Artist, museum visitors were faced with a choice between...