Port Pirie Regional Gallery, 21.12.2019-26.1.2020, Port Pirie, Australia & Kemi Art Museum, 17.1.-8.3.2020, Kemi, Finland. The Poetic Peripheries exhibition (Vivienne Crisp Gallery) includes artists Taina Kontio, Satu Miettinen, Mari Mäkiranta, and Melanie Saranto. This collective includes four researcher-artists who focus on the questions of social responsibility, Arctic nature, global and local peripheries, and cultural identities, which are visualized through images of Arctic waters, landscapes, and people. “Smokes and Meditation” is a series of self-portraits discussing the embodied presence and the balance between the body and mind. We tend to present ourselves in the “good light” or as “presentable selves.” This may create pressure to take on the role of the desired self. How to present womanhood is always under tension, whether it’s nakedness or how motherhood is presented in pictures. These images can become iconic or scrutinized, and certainly they should fit the norms. Smoking is unhealthy and dangerous. What kind of image does one present with smoking? Will this fit the role one has given oneself in the post-modernist discourse, or maybe it is theater? Can one enjoy hedonistic pleasures without being an outcast? What if your embodied self is not performed and doesn’t meet the competitive criteria? What if you don’t fit the healthy image and you are experienced as a threat to the medicalized society? It may be that even your gaze doesn’t fit the perception of beauty? One can also see oneself with a bit of tongue in cheek. The ways we see ourselves can be hilarious and not too serious.