Titti Miettinen
I FREEZE IT AT NIGHTS. I MUST.
5.1. – 27.1.2019
Imprints appear, always. Living a life means leaving marks: scratches on floors, tables and walls. Or the surface of the skin. Everything changes. Nobody and nothing can avoid changing.
Marks are resented. Many people prefer old apartments neurotically renovated and middle-aged skin injected with neurotoxins. Why? What are we trying to hide or protect ourselves from?
People are exposed in their everyday arrangements – the kinds of marks and items they leave around themselves, how and where. An attentive person can observe a lot in, say, the types of groceries left in certain ways on certain types of tables.
I work with ready-made objects and water. I build arrangements. I don’t modify the objects. I don’t cut, glue or sew anything. But I modify the water. I freeze it at nights.
I use items from my home. I live without them during the exhibition, pondering absence, change and letting go. I combine some of my vintage and basic-ikea with protective building supplies: wind barrier boards, marking tapes and rolls of protective paper are seen in new and old roles. Amongst all this, the water is alive silently and undramatically in its casual contexts as it usually is in our homes. And the ice melts. Things float. Others sink.
Homes actually are continuous imprints of our lives. Our existence creates carbon footprints (an imprint indeed) but also visual and micro-historical story-telling. When we die, someone else cleans our imprints, in those very homes we leave behind.
But! The word “but” negates all that has just been said. And the word must be used now. This is because, of course, also this exhibition deals with the actual foundation and floor of all current questions, on which everything stands and onto which everything will collapse: the fact that ice indeed melts because of our lives.
Yes, the pretty little ice in my works melts. It happens every day. And I nurture the exhibition: I come in the mornings and carry the nocturnally frozen ice carefully back in its place. But, this picturesque busywork will not change the fact that ice melts given a certain temperature.
Thus the glaciers will abandon us. They will jilt us. Everything changes. For good. The marks on our floors or faces will cease to matter in the ways we have taken the privilege to get used to. We will be left on our own floors, those imprinted by our lives.
Wind barrier boards reduce the formation of so-called thermal bridges on walls. For this exhibition, I have built some floor of wall materials and personal space using protective paper. This is how I took cover. Homo sapiens is a boundlessly stupid animal and will not let go of her lazily sweet comforts unless there’s a must of some kind. And ice melts. Things float. Others sink. Choices have been made and they cannot be reversed. New choices have to be made. It’s a must.
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titti.miettinen(at)gmail.com
The wind barrier boards in the exhibition are donated by HUNTON.
