Imagined Future Memory
The Makasiini Contemporary gallery, Turku, Finland, 2024
Tiina Pyykkinen’s recent artistic work centres on the themes of the embodied mind, bodily memory, and time. She is interested in how the mutual interaction between the body and its surroundings produces information, and how this operates through the visible world.
In her paintings, the themes of embodiment and temporality are made visible in the formal structure of the visual motifs, the use of the material properties of the paint, and through the viewer and changes taking place in their surroundings. Her site-and-time-specific works consist of flat, transparent layers – both independent and interconnected – applied onto a reflective surface. A painted visual motif is combined with the illusion of a three-dimensional form via which viewers perceive their own mirror images and changes in their surroundings. Together, they produce a situation in which the paintings could be called moving pictures: time planes that combine the present with the past. Pyykkinen uses the motifs in her paintings to refer repeatedly to surroundings and objects familiar from everyday life, but their mode of depiction is allusive and their subjects are rendered using a different form language, that of the shadow image.
The planes painted with thin layers of paint and brushstrokes act as interfaces, as skin-like layers through which the viewer’s reflection appears blurred. Grasping both the individual shapes and the different planes simultaneously proves impossible, since choosing to focus our perception on a single image plane blurs the outlines and shapes on any other. These paintings disturbi: the shifting view eludes us and then becomes present again. In them Pyykkinen accentuates interactivity, in which they cannot be interpreted via any one of the symbolic, the material or the aesthetic alone.
