Rusto Myllylahti is an artist who works with installation, sound, image, performance, and objects. Joy, freeform, and juxtapositions of meaning are at the center of their artistic production. The exhibition showcases an installation of masks and distortion, a warped dry spa of sorts. Sini Silveri is a multidisciplinary poet, whose work traces the quirks in social and bodily movement. In the exhibition, movement appears in the form of words, clay, and paint. Mud is burning in each one of these substances. Tuomo Tuovinen is a visual artist devoted to a lifelong video archive project, and who is producing a broad series called Is Love a Mirage? A metamorphosis of soul and memory will be on display.
TIME and CREATURE (AIKA ja OLENTO in Finnish) is Rusto, Sini and Tuomo’s first collective exhibition. The trio is united by a long friendship and the inevitable connection brought forth by artistic endeavor. The reflection about creatureliness is palpable in all their works. Creature here is just a word to speak about (ontological, physical, aesthetic) form. It’s a DIY-philosophical attribute, which anyone can apply to any form, from the skin-like appearance of a wall to the corporeality of images in society, to the biggest or faintest of sounds, even to ourselves. A foam mattress is cut into a human-like shape. The background detaches and something oozes out of the edges. Crescent moon faces.
Time lives alongside the creature, it coils in the creature’s innards, in its silliness, in the character-like nature of it all. When the creature moves, time moves, when the creature moves it wakes its background into life. A mobile time arrives, a moving creatureliness in all its normalcy. Nostalgia is too shallow a term to convey this multiplicity. The creature is a gloomy stare and a hovering presence in the void layering the video and the canvas. Rusto’s creatures are masks, given that the spectator has accepted the character is presenting its own reality. A layered and precisely built materiality underlies all of these pieces. Sini’s creature is verbal and referentially unspecified, anonymous. Tuomo’s creature is chronomorphic. All these beings deal with wallowing in ruin, with loitering in a world soiled by merchandise.
In the forest image there’s a Wu-Tang Clan logo carved in stone, the brown of soil, a smile and a blonde concrete branch.
A bird is perched on it.
Today’s t-shirt is a pillowcase for the rack of the self. When falling asleep, nothingness intersects. No going, no being. A FLYING FIGURE and a LITTLE DEVIL hang out with the bunny in the closeup picture. There is time and a creature, a molten being of blood and hair, out of itself, in the life after life.