Alte Schönhauser Straße 26 Paintings, Polaroids and 8mm film, 2011
The series titled 'Alte Schönhauser Straße 26' combines three different mediums, which he labels the archetypes of image production: Realist oil painting, Polaroid photography, and Super 8 film. The main difference between these three mediums is in the time it takes to create them. The paintings can take tens of hours of work, while the films bring the viewer to a direct temporal presence within the project.
With 'Alte Schönhauser Straße 26' focus is on imaging and reconstituting the studio space that dually functions as his home and place of work. Within this space the artist finds confidence in his creative process and constructs his own presence as an artist, intersecting physical and mental conditions.
Working interactively is a way to get to know a new environment and to find one's place within its social networks. In order to explore his relation to space, himself and these networks Eemil Karila meticulously documents characters as they enter and exit 'his network', his place of production and habitation at Alte Schönhauser Straße 26 in Berlin.
The models in the paintings are the artist's close friends who partake voluntarily in their documentation. They visit the artists regularly until the completion of the painting.
In his work, Karila is interested in showing the unseen. Although the work in this exhibition appears in a very conventional medium, the ongoing project and its research deal with issues of time and space; how the contextualization of social events through art gives them a body and content
