Karin Kytökangas
Characteristic of my work is one-liners of words, a certain cold color scheme, a dark sense of humor and the handmade quality. The creation part is chaotic and constantly changing. I start with an initial mental spark of what it is that I want to convey, may it be a symbolic image, a word, or a gesture in a sculpture, and from there it is a treasure hunt for different materials, colors, and ways to put it together. I try out all possibilities and strip it down to the content again, until it, ironically, feels 100% correct. For my painting practice, I use drawings from my diary or arrange a still-life. Using hyper-realistic colors I once again swim between what is real and what is imaginative. I´d like to put the viewer on the spot: who is the viewer of what? In preparatory school in Sweden, I spent two years straight learning color theory and how to mix colors which highly influence my current paintings. For sculptural works, I usually chose waste materials such as paper and scraps of fabric. I am drawn to their humbleness.
My work is a sincere wish to visualize the border between the inner fantastical mind and the literal visual world. There I find the visual enjoyment of colors, of how words quickly make meaning, and how a joke penetrates the logical thinking mind despite being just that: a logical thought loop. The ‘border’ also contains questions about what is actually valuable and I like to see my work as a long stretch between what is meaningful and complete nonsense; between psychedelic silliness and beautiful seriousness. I am also a part of a group called the Association for the Palliative Turn which is a project initiated by the artist Olav Westphalen. The collective group takes up various aspects of medical palliative practice in order to incorporate it into artistic work, but also to question our understanding of death and dying – and to discuss what climate change and the decreasing life expectancy of our ecosystems have for the design of our future. The Palliative Turn consists of people from various fields such as artists, philosophers, scientists, a comedian, and palliative care experts. I see my participation as a continuation of what I already do, and my take on the subject is to mock companies’ belief of being immortal and to embrace the failure and the nonsensical. |