Pictures

My exhibition is based on interruption and the emptiness caused by it. I discuss the broken relationship between the past and the present  as well as the duality of being in the space between the customary and the unfamiliar.

We place ourselves into the present through views of the past and the future. Change breaks the linear progress of stability and the lack of perceiving new operations models creates a vacuum. Thus, duality is created when the known also turns  into the unknown. Being in limbo causes a sense of detachment and  non-attachment  to the surroundings.

When being estranged, it is hard to organize the pieces of happiness we have into a usable entity. Our chances and everyday life appear as embryos that are hard to catch and attach to. The instability of a balancing basic everyday unsettles our conceptions of ourselves and our activities in relation to our surrounds. The unknown is uncontrollable, and unawareness and vagueness reduce our strength. We face fear, loss, uncertainty, and failure, but we also face our honest  and plain selves.

Emptiness, however, is also a state of searching and OF a new possibility. What with the past having collapsed, and the lack of an existing system, we must be responsible for the task of reconstruction. Analysis enables recovery. Creating an entity is simultaneously being and becoming something.

My exhibition consists of pieces of landscape. It includes two parts which I have named Kulku (“Progression”) and Näkymä (“View”). In the front room of the gallery, there are trees sawed in two parts that are  reflected in the boards that cover the floor, and in the blotchy mural  that has been partly washed off. Kulku ends at a kind of a dock in the back room, the floor of which is flooded with water. The charcoal drawing on the wall as well as the rootstalk at the water’s edge portray a forest. On the back wall, the reflection of a dim light creates a horizon-like view.


Mirimari Väyrynen
+35850 349 73 43
mirimariv(at)yahoo.com

 

Pictures

”We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression.”

Italo Calvino


My exhibition Placelessness consists of textual works and photographs that discuss place, presence, and the passing of time. The basis of my works is an observation of an object – but how to present, with a still photograph, something that is abstract, invisible, or in constant change? Change is built-in in a place. My attempt is to grasp places by presenting them as pictures turned into words; as stories; as photographs. In the works in the exhibition, places resemble one another; they are presented as absent or removed; or they are just referred to. The name of the exhibition includes wistfulness about the impossibility of sharing experiences of existence and, on the other hand, a dream of change and of sharing it.

n my artistic work, I aim at combining the verbal and the visual. Typically, a photograph captures the uniqueness of the moment and the subject. A photograph is a picture of a certain target at a certain moment. Laconic words, for one, escape the uniqueness of the picture and make a certain window into any window or all of them. The use of text in my works is an attempt to resurrect a still picture. Reading words and text happens in the present, and their definitions exist at the moment of reading.  As an interpreter, I knowingly face the impossible when trying to verbalize visual information. There is a break, a crack, between the visual and the verbal. Obviously, everything cannot be verbalized, and the tale is constantly doomed to being unfinished.

The basis for the work Talo (“House”) is a photograph in which the visual information has been replaced by individual words. My attempt is to restore the rough entity, to observe accurately. A roof, a wall, a bush, a window. Words describe what is beyond sight. The original picture has been abstracted into words floating in the air. There are no clear entities in the picture, just pieces of which one tries to compile something. By the words pictures, every viewer becomes an active producer of definitions, and the distance between doing and watching becomes shorter. The pictures flee from a single certain, right interpretation, summary, or answer.

In the exhibition, the places seem to be neither here nor there. The works are presented as sketches of themselves, undefined, unfinished. Places are not located.


Additional info and press photos: Noomi Ljungdell, tel. +358505258572, noomi(at)noomiljungdell.com

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