Jenny Ollikainen

art does not need to make sense,

art makes the world make sense

Anything is art,

art is whatever you want it to be

Art is a thought manifested somehow into the reality that you and I share

Art is a tool

Art heals, color heals, finger painting heals

ART MUST BE FUN

if it is not fun than you are doing it wrong

You can never be wrong when making art

Art allows inner worlds to flip and unfold into this outer world

It helps show us how to be human

Art is fantastical

Art is freedom

Art is magical

Being an artist is equivalent to be being a shaman

An artist must have dreams

Art is ancient

Art transforms

Art is very serious

Material of art is not relevant

Art does not always have to be what people say it is

You don’t have to spell to make art

Art is not serious

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Jenny Ollikainen selects

Joseph Bueys

“Fat chair “

1964

Joseph Bueys “Fat chair” is a metaphorical sculpture using symbols with specific symbolic materials. The wooden chair is representational of the human form obeying to order, while the block of fat placed on the chair is symbolic to Bueys as chaos. This is so because the fat will undergo metamorphosis with temperature change. Bueys states “everything is in a state of change” and “chaos can have a healing character” this change of metamorphosis that the fat undergoes confirms Bueys belief in mans own spiritual transcendence.

Beuys claimed that the artist is a contemporary shaman to the modern society, and also believed that every person was capable of being an artist. Beuys also wanted to bridge people with science and the relationship people have with myth and magic. Bueys used art as a way of healing himself and the world as a whole from past trauma of world war two.

Bueyes work has influenced me in an understanding of how powerful art really is, and how it can help one understand life differently than what the society they were born into has given us. I too want to use art as a tool to further my spiritual growth and also use it as a way of healing.

Jonathan Borofsky

“Installation”

1983

In Borofsky’s installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1983 one would walk into a room full of chaos full of images, movements, noises, and light. The installation was thought of as a mental landscape of the artist with the intimacy of the artist studio, where on was looking straight into his mind. This extremely personal work would be a jumble of content, jump in size, style and scale. Borofsky would draw directly on the walls and floors of the gallery spaces. This work would therefore be unsellable re assuring him that people came to see and interact with his art for the experience.

The drawings were freehanded and loose sometimes recalling from a dream and were connected to a number in which he would sit for hours numbering papers in a state of meditation until something would come out, a scribble, figure, or scene in then which he would create.

I find freedom in how Borofsky created and thought about art. I can relate to this way of making art, random, chaotic, with the use of the subconscious and dreams. This work is also very honest, not trying to be anything else than what it is, it is not clean, but is directly related to the mind of the artist.

Saya Woolfalk

“No Place: A Ritual Of The Emphatics”

2009

“No place” is a colorful fictional land, imagined by the artist to investigate the human condition and the future of humankind. This utopian place is a mixture of drawing, painting and sculpture. The imaginary land is made up of biology, class, race, sexuality and other situations that people of the modern society deal with on a daily basis. The difference between this reality and that of “No place” is that it is the direction in which Woolfalk would like to see humanity move toward, in my opinion that is becoming closer to nature.

This dreamscape is a fantastical place, which transcends the ordinary human into a different world. The mysterious creatures that one would find in “No place” are that of asexuality and creatures bordering in between plant life and mammilla. Cross breeds of plant and animal that can shape shift at will, eat, sleep, live, and die inside of this world.

Woolfalk is interested in the “other” and feels as though the “paradigm of the Other is shifting.” And she is also interested in “changing the world and answering the cry for something in which to believe”

Woolfalk is a great influence on my art, because she creatively imagines and manifests fantastical worlds with the use of paint, drawing, and soft sculpture. She is able to transcend regular daily life into something different; a viewer is whooshed away into a new fantastical utopia.