from the series Tranquillity

During the summer of 2012, on a long drive from Northern California to Los Angeles along the I-5 Freeway, Heikki Kaski impulsively decided to visit the small Californian town of Tranquillity, encouraged by its imaginative name. Sitting along an irrigation ditch in the semi-arid Fresno County agricultural region, he discovered an unfulfilled dream still charged by its initial hopes. Over the next year and a half, Kaski would continuously return, directing his lens from the cracked asphalt to decrepit barns to people to landscapes. Slowly, an editing process and documentary focus emerged as he began to immerse himself in the town’s community and history. The result is a series of distinctly poetic images that reveal a raw beauty in the mundane and psychologically complex character of one small town in America’s West. For Kaski, Tranquillity is as much a real place, as a state of mind.