HAA Gallery presents works from Sanna Kananoja’s new painting series Water’s course after yesterday, where she uses repetition to examine the relationship between the starting point and the painting process in her work based on photographs. Each painting in the series has exactly the same starting point, a photograph of the roadside. This image represents self-evident and functional everyday nature.

Water’s course after yesterday deals with the nearby nature, focusing on the repetition of everyday life, the similarity of days and moments. All the paintings are based on a view from Kananoja’s daily commute. The difference between looking and seeing things is clear on a familiar journey. The subject is ordinariness: its safety, invisibility and unquestionability. Roads and roadsides are only possible through a huge amount of earthmoving. Rocks are blasted, trees are felled, earth is dug up and the flow of water is directed. Most of the Earth’s land surface has already been changed by humans. The small piece of earth that appears in Kananoja’s works represents this larger phenomenon.

In everyday life, the landscapes of Kananoja’s works are usually not even thought of as real nature, but as part of the built environment. In the paintings, the matter turns around – the viewer sees nature, it takes on an independent meaning, and everyday environments become ideal landscapes for a moment. During the Romantic era, man was depicted as small next to the great forces of nature, for example on top of a lonely mountain. In her works, Kananoja presents the same thing with everyday elements: humans act in order to control but nature seeks its own way, being small, big, wild and unpredictable.

Repetition brings routine and exposes to boredom as Kananoja focuses on the same sketch photo for a long time. The subject recedes into the background but is underlined at the same time. Change and immutability are constantly present in the paintings. They highlight the control and uncontrollability of the painting process, where the goal is always to start from the beginning.

Sanna Kananoja (b. 1979 Pirkkala) lives and works in Oulu. She graduated as a visual artist from the Turku Academy of Arts in 2010. Kananoja’s works have been exhibited in numerous solo and joint exhibitions. She belongs to the Artists’ Association of Finland and the artists’ societies of Oulu and Turku. Kananoja’s works are included in the Finnish State Art Deposit Collection, the city of Turku, the Oulu Art Museum, University of Turku Central Hospital and HUS, as well as in private collections.

”A five-hour journey in the backseat of a car numbs my legs. When I’m old enough, I travel alone by train, two transfers, sandwiches wrapped in paper. At your place kilometers away, there is always early summer, vacation and play. I look at black and white photographs and listen to your stories about their faded characters, you paint the looks and actions of past generations. I draw flowers and girls in that never-ending, thick, square journal. They are pretty, but you would like me to draw a person with wrinkles, someone whom life has made beautiful.

I ring the doorbell and wait for the nurse to arrive. Behind a locked door, you sit in a chair with others yet alone. I say hello and seek recognition in your gaze. On the bed in your white room, you relax while talking about your parents, gently and painfully. But you don’t always want to be there, in this moment you say you manage, sticking signs here and there. Words are hard to find. On the wall hangs a self-portrait I painted in high school; you tell me that it portrays you.”

The central theme of Maaria Jokimies’ exhibition is the presence of the past in the present, which she has approached through her grandmother’s memory disorder and her own nostalgic longing. The different techniques approach the theme from different directions.

In the oil paintings, Jokimies mainly depicts her grandmother from her own perspective, emphasizing her own point of view and at the same time seeking to identify with grandmother by imagining the reality she experiences with dementia. In small paintings made with watercolours and ink on canvas, Jokimies recalls her grandmother’s archive by depicting the pages of photo albums and small everyday memories kept between them, such as recipes, dried flowers and paper dolls. In paper works and woodcuts printed with gouache, Jokimies depicts important and fascinating objects and details from her childhood visits to her grandmother’s.

”While working with the paintings, I pondered the mutability of memories over time: how new information accumulates to modify the interpretation of memories, or how old memories strengthen when the brain is no longer able to produce new ones.”

Maaria Jokimies (b. 1992) graduated from Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. Her paintings have been exhibited in many galleries in Finland, e.g., in the art museums of Lahti and Imatra. There are works from Jokimies in the collections of the Tampere Art Museum and the Prime Minister’s Office Finland.

The exhibition has been supported by the Héléne and Walter Grönqvist Foundation.

HAA Gallery
Suomenlinna C1, 00190 Helsinki
Opening hours: Tue–Thu 12–6 pm, Fri–Sun 12–4pm