Sofia Okkonen & Kristina Sedlerova Villanen: SUGARTRAP

What unites Okkonen and Sedlerova Villanen as artists, is the un-earthing and picking of emotional locks. Okkonen’s works in the exhibition are based on her earlier series of photographs titled Honey, Please, in which she has approached themes such as fertility, reproduction, tenderness and the capacity for loving compassion. Simultaneously, Sedlerova Villanen tests her own position on the scale of geological time, and exposes the prevailing hierarchical economic-political order and its values to high pressure.

Okkonen and Sedlerova Villanen stimulate the space of Sinne and take the viewer on a journey to the knots and dusty corners where sensitivity and vulnerability may lie. Those become the entrance, the key, to SUGARTRAP. The work points to our inner selves and how social norms and traditions cling to us as we navigate between expectations, loves and perpetual change. The physical pieces move too; some of Okkonen’s large photographs are tilted and seem to levitate. One photograph is on the floor, and on top of it is a sculpture by Sedlerova Villanen that spreads organically through the space. The stacks of paper hint at repetition and act as pedestals for a granite work covered in toffee.