Poetic Peripheries

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 visualised through images of arctic waters, landscapes and people.

Smokes and meditation is 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 role of the desired self. How to present womanhood is always under tension. Whether it’s nakedness or how the 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 one presents with smoking? Will this fit to the role one has given to oneself in the post-modernist discourse or maybe it is theater? Can one enjoy hedonist 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 thread to medicalized society? It may be that even your gaze doesn’t fit the perception of beauty?

One can see oneself also bit tongue in the cheek. The ways we see ourself can also be hilarious and not too serious.