The problems I deal with as an artist envelop me. Seeing as they are mostly values tied up with language and aesthetics, they are also a part of me. Laying these problems bare is the work of my artistic practice.
After about ten years of articulating the above sentiment, I have also identified my everyday steroid-injection of inspiration. Harmful ideologies pile up in my idea collection. Universalism, competition, boobs, butt holes, ever-intensifying joy and glossy commodities swim around each other in my pools of words and images. Eventually, I scoop these signs up to scrutinize how I am so intimate with them. In all my work, an illusion of certainty appropriated from theory contrasts with the uncertainty that is enthralling in art, sustaining a tension that is crucial to my explorations.
The tension I seek comes from frenzy and confusion, which in turn comes from ethical self-contradictions and unethical desires. Tracking my own and other people’s sense of moral virtue, I dig up ways one might latch on to bad stuff thinking it will make life livable. Playing with depiction of forces greater than myself, I ask: how can a life surrounded by toxicity be so fun and inspiring? How can I synthesize conceptions of good and evil, to escape the binary bad-good stalemate?
I always search Good in Bad
I also search Bad in Good
So…ooooooooo…
… I am a Very Good Bad Boy1
I am, indeed, a very good bad boy. I pretend to be a doctor identifying my own sickness. I make my own theories to sooth uncertainty, yet could never with good conscience present a stable perspective. The resonance of inconsistency so intimately linked with a desire for clarity is at once a form of self-harm and a remedy, my pharmakon.
* Vennu Mallesh in his song “It’s My Life Whatever I Wanna Do”
Website:
https://www.jaanakristiina.se/
Images:
01. Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen (2024) Sculpture, video, dust, rubbish, readymades, dimensions variable. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger
02. Snookie (2024) Screenshot and digital drawing on cardboard, height: 165 cm. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger
03. Obsessed with this girl (2024) Graphite and coloured pencil on paper, 41 x 59 cm. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger
04. Detail of Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen (2024)Sculpture, video, dust, rubbish, readymades, dimensions variable. Best Girlfriend (2024) Customized stuffed toy, 28 x 8 x 20 cm. Photo: Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski
