Irrallisia Asioita

Mirka Raito: Irrallisia Asioita / Loose Things 11.3.– 26.3.2017 in gallery Huuto Jätkäsaari - Pikkujätkä

Opening on Friday 10th of March 6 - 8 pm. Welcome!

Life is loose things: loose memories, loose moments, loose thoughts, loose relationships, feelings of being loose, trying to find a connection between things or hoping to feel related to something. Life is about solving concepts and contexts. To-Do lists, odd socks, stray cats, movabels, waste, displaced persons or people who lost themselves. Takeoffs, layoffs, missing pieces, freaking out or detaching oneself from the past to be able to arrive at this moment.

Mirka Raito’s exhibition Loose Things consists of collages and paintings made of found pictures, sketches, incomplete works and photos that were still laying around in her archives, waiting for the next step. The first impulse for the new works came from an urge to clear and clean up, to sort the things which at first glance seemed to be just loose. There is something playful and meditative in putting pieces together without an urgent instinct for storytelling or the necessitity to argue for a connection between loose parts. Raito is interested in portraying worlds of the subconscious and working associatively.

Mirka Raito gets impulses from motives that disturb or fascinate her. Perhaps the motive awakens a childhood memory, feelings of tenderness, hate or hope. In her collages one can find many overlapping pictures as in a falsely combined puzzle. The pictures hide other pictures or something has been cut out of them. The viewer’s gaze collects landscapes, faces, eyes, plants and constructions in the guts of the fragmentary pictures. Sometimes there is only a few lines, a crisscross or a sketch left after the process and we are luckily back at the starting point.