The show’s curator Mika Hannula comments:
“Inside Out moves from the level of the familiar and recognizable towards something new and out-of-the-ordinary. The content is themed around interiors and domestic details – settings that are familiar and ordinary to everyone. Intimate interiors and domestic nooks and crannies provide a trampoline for a varied array of connotations. Presented together, the featured paintings and sculptures take us in unexpected directions – the artists’ approach to the subject and the functions they invent for everyday objects are surprising, not to mention the visual guises. The close becomes distant, the familiar is made strange, and the mundane acquires a storybook quality – or vice versa.
Filling the floors and walls of the gallery, the exhibits delve into the oft-forgotten, unnoticed details at the core of our everyday experiential existence. The exhibition captures life’s recurring events on an imaginary level, linking together the tangible and the utopian, realism and poetry. It moves from inside out, transitioning from the private to the public sphere, with imagination serving as the vehicle for navigating this transition. Inside Out is a visual journey that conflates form with content, engagingly and playfully revealing new perspectives and associations.
The core tropes of the exhibition are ‘recycled’ commonplace household items that perform surprising new functions (Johansson). Or, applying a converse logic, ‘big’, inescapable themes are condensed in miniature, internalized form (Immonen). Inside Out also revels in the idiosyncratic qualities of everyday objects, celebrating their specificity through the medium and expressive tools of painting (Mäkilä). A painting can also serve as a window through which we observe an unknown but appealing turn of events that reveals kindness to be not an encumbrance but an exceptionally beautiful resource (Mäenpää).”
