Karoliina Myllymäki: Oneirataxia

Snow is delighted to present Oneirataxia by the Finnish artist Karoliina Myllymäki opening July 9, 2022 and running through July 24.

Oneirataxia

(n.) the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality

The exhibition consists of my anthropological and botanical studies from the last couple of years, with the most recent ones made this summer. For me, drawing is one way of exploring and contemplating on being a human and on life.

The longer I have been drawing people, the more abstract my expression has become. What a human or the experience of being a human can be?

The experience is always unique and can be physical, psychological, spiritual or emotional. It can also feel real or purely imaginary. What does it feel like when your legs are heavy and growing, and your whole body is one piece of unsupported dough. What is it like to expand and dissipate or merge with another? What does it feel like to be an object or to become part of something? To petrify, to solidify? Lightness, heaviness, bending, encountering? To move, to stop, to expand, to collapse.

A human’s essence is their way of being, a way which has no permanent character. In my studies, the human is in a state of constant change, not clearly delineated or easily structured or defined. The forms of being and ways of experiencing are diverse and personal in their nature. Sometimes the experience can be so cryptic or ambiguous that its veracity cannot be assured. We can also confuse our own experience with the experience of another. Identify with and empathise.

I aim for energy, motion and organicity in my expression. I play with distorted perspectives and contrasts between the organic and the geometric. The structured and the ordered, the illogical and the chaotic. With few lines I try to express as much as possible, and most of my works are black and white simplified line drawings. My working style is fast and intuitive and my visual language is influenced by, for example, sculpture, whose reduced forms inspire me. With an understanding of perspectives and proportions, you can start to deliberately distort them. This adds a new level of interest and excitement to art. The end result is, however, always born out of intuition and instinct, based on conscious choices.

- Karoliina Myllymäki

Curated by Susanne Johansson.