JURY 2019 – Iida Nikitin, Sirpa Ojala, Meri Pauniaho

The 2019 exhibition season at Poriginal Gallery is opened by a group exhibition titled JURY, featuring three contemporary visual artists from Satakunta.

The Pori Art Museum invited associations representing professional artists from Satakunta to select representatives for the selection committee of Poriginal Gallery’s 2019 exhibitions. The selected members for the committee were Iida Nikitin (T.E.H.D.A.S, NYTE), Sirpa Ojala (Pori Society of Artists, NYTE), and Meri Pauniaho (The Association of Finnish Printmakers, Rauma Printmakers Association).

The other members of the committee included the director of the Pori Art Museum and the gallery manager of Poriginal Gallery.

Iida Nikitin
Gone(s)ness

Painting is for me about being, breathing, dividing into as many directions as possible. It’s the cutting and breaking of gestures and meanings into a grey area, unrecognizable. It’s the unfolding of emotion and the discovery of a new language. I don’t search for a holistic idea or setup to place myself or others in. I rarely paint cohesive series or revisit a piece multiple times. I quickly become bored with one idea, so I find it useful to paint many pieces simultaneously, as if composing a situation or conversation between them. For this reason, I find it interesting to hang three different painting series in an exhibition space, where they can give something to each other while also distinguishing themselves from one another.

In the darkness, the paintings are light, colors that must be tuned to align so the tension is created and the image starts to resonate. The intensity rises, and under manic pressure, white covers a cornucopia, resetting everything that appears. Sometimes, it reveals everything that exists—the breath of colors passing through each other. I don’t want to divide experiences into opposites or polarize things into fixed places to see the whole. Still, I feel energies flowing from deep black sap to light pearlescent particles, and that feeling is just as melodramatic. As if the entire environment had been possessed to flip a cartwheel into the final temptation, while also ready to see its weakness, its power, and beauty. The earth and air open, heavy-light as if lifting off the earth’s edge. Dark tenacity and a frustrated, bored mood summon themselves into oblivion until they fade away.

I think it’s difficult to find belief in the closeness of the moment or the reality of presence—it’s too marked and too much of a ready-made story. In my paintings, accusing fingers and moments of judgment arise, pigments mix with saliva and wear out into transparency. Animals or people represent a sense of time, its loss, its questioning, things and movements where beings become objects.

In this situation, being broken and losing one’s edges gives the opportunity to see and experience something unexpected, an unknown other. That is when a fragile idea of touch, a successful vision, success, meeting someone and losing them grows.

I live in Pori and create art using various methods and overlapping media. In recent years, I’ve focused on performance art, painting, and video art. My practice involves both art-making and research, participation in artists’ associations (T.E.H.D.A.S. and NYTE ry.), and event organizing.

I paint and draw with chalks, oil and acrylic paints on cotton and linen fabrics, plexiglass, aluminum composite sheets, and particleboard.

Sirpa Ojala

The way a part of the landscape ends up on canvas or paper is always a path, a journey, a surprise, a process, and ultimately a miracle. The selected subject acquires emotions, new directions during the painting process, trees change shape, and the painting lives and breathes just as the forest does. From every window of my studio, I can see trees, a forest. The forest is inside me; I am in the forest. In my work, I aim for a certain relaxation and illusion of outdoor painting. In this exhibition, I present new works from 2018, including my latest forest study born from the darkness of November, which is being shown for the first time. The paintings are acrylic on canvas and plywood.

Artist Sirpa Ojala lives and works in Pomarkku. She studied at Pori Art School from 1979-1982. Ojala has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the region since the late 1970s and has held several solo exhibitions. Her work has also been part of international group exhibitions, including in Põltsamaa, Estonia (2018) and Warsaw, Poland (2014). Her experience of over thirty years with gouache paintings led to a transition to acrylic paintings on canvas in the early 2010s.

Sirpa Ojala is a member of the Pori Society of Artists, and her works are also available through the online art store Taiko.fi.

Meri Pauniaho

Since 2006, I have been depicting various spaces, rooms, and landscapes in my works, where the presence of a person can be felt, but the person is not visible. The models for my quiet and beauty-seeking works have included important places from my childhood, grandmothers’ houses, and past homes. Through these, I have wanted to explore human existence, the formation of identity, and the legitimacy of memory and recollections. Time passes; some things stay, some disappear, and some become timeless.

Currently, my newest works can be roughly divided into three categories: interiors, landscapes, and depictions of nature. All these share a fusion of the experienced and the imagined, multiple perspectives, multicoloredness, and rich surface textures. However, all continue to explore the same theme—remembering, the place of memory, and the place of recollections.

My works strongly draw from personal life events, yet they can always be viewed on a general level, free from personal baggage—perhaps as small ethnographic studies of strangely familiar objects or through the character of a panda-bear figure lingering in landscapes, though this figure also serves as an alter ego—a reference to the current pandas in the Ähtäri Zoo or Finnish nature and its future.

I print small editions of 4-6 prints. My works are relief prints or a combination of relief and intaglio printing techniques, created using a single plate. In each print, there are usually four to six layers of color, sometimes even nine or ten.

I am a printmaker from Rauma (b. 1972), a member of The Association of Finnish Printmakers and Rauma Printmakers Association. I graduated as a visual artist (AMK) from the Lahti Institute of Fine Arts in 2014. Previously, I graduated as a textile artist (AMK) from the Kuopio School of Art and Design in 1996.

Translated with ChatGPT