The opening of the exhibition Silent But Alert by Anna Hyrkkänen, Katri Mononen and Mia Saharla takes place at HAA Gallery on Wednesday, September 4, 2024 at 5 pm! The exhibition runs from 5 September until 29 September, 2024. You are warmly welcome!
Image: Anna Hyrkkänen, Katri Mononen & Mia Saharla
Anna Hyrkkänen, Katri Mononen & Mia Saharla: Silent But Alert
The exhibition Silent But Alert brings together works by Anna Hyrkkänen, Katri Mononen and Mia Saharla. The exhibition emerges from a collaborative working process and ongoing dialogue among the artists. They share an interest in juxtaposing different medias blending their borders. The multisensory exhibition is based on bodily and haptic experiences and combines contemporary painting with sculpture and spatial works. The works relate to each other and the viewer from being silent to very alert, from tranquil to conflict seeking. The theme of bodily knowledge, discussed by author Siri Hustvedt in her essay collection Living, thinking, looking, has been guiding the working processes:
”The truth about unconscious processes is that sometimes the book knows more than the writer. That is knowledge that often originates from the body, a preverbal rhythmical point of movement. Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses it by the term schéma corporel, body schema. When I don’t find the words, it helps to walk.”
Hustvedt (2016), 66.
Anna Hyrkkänen’s piece Wednesday in Indigo Blue is a participatory installation. Hyrkkänen’s work is inspired by synesthesia and brain research. She is fascinated by haptic experiences as part of art. Synesthesia is a melange of senses as experienced by an individual. A synesthetic person may taste a given food as triangle shaped or perceive a persons tone of speech and its conceptual content as coal which is bursting out of the speakers mouth. www.annahyrkkanen.fi
Abstract and representative elements meet in the artworks by Katri Mononen. The borderline between those can be volatile. Layered painting process is in the middle of her practice. An idea of different body movements and observation of details in the space of HAA Gallery have guided the process of her works in the Silent but Alert exhibition. Sprains and sags, climbs and refractions happen in these artworks. Visual references to plant themes and geometric abstractions commenting on modernist tradition can be found from her works. Mononen combines spray paints, acrylic, oil and collage techniques. She also works with three dimensional works using materials left over from paintings. www.katrimononen.com
Mia Saharla works within the extended painting. In her works she looks for a place that could be described as the circle of possibilities. It’s a space inside the psyche, connected to both the analytical mind as well as to the fantasies. This place is the location of children’s playing as well as the artistic practice. The exhibited works stress the bodily experiences; the movement of the viewer and the direction of their gaze, the bodily responses that the works arise, as well as the body of the painting object itself unraveling into the space from its traditional easel painting form. www.miasaharla.net
NB An artist meeting will be held on Sunday, 29th September, at 2 pm.
The exhibition has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Finnish Cultural Foundation.