Visual artists Leena Kangas from Oulu and Christelle Mas, a french artist now living and working in Oulu, present their joint exhibition at the Kemi Museum of Art. On display are Kangas’s paintings, Mas’s photographs, drawings, video poetry and an installation

Leena Kangas: �Could be I opened the wrong door. Maybe I should have opened a different one, the next one, but I opened this one and it reads �Painting�. So here I am. Painting is a mystery to me. Still. How can it be? As what state of being, because that is what it is, does it reveal itself to me? My paintings become more and more abstract. Often no words relate to them. It could be that years as an art critic had to come to this. The drive to understand is key and it in some ways permeates my life, as does the desire to find my own visual language and to communicate in it.”

Christelle Mas: �In my work, food mutates and attains a state of being between plant and animal. I want to create a new organic life-form, one that can be harmful to humans and that can subsist without them. The familiar and safe is transformed by the photo into something strange and obscure. Often what remains is just the impression of a life-form with unknown origin. The camera is the best tool I have to portray the relationship between reality and fiction. The photo indicates a presence: it proves that something was there, but at the same time shifts the boundaries of reality and changes it. A photograph has the power to create illusions.”

Exhibition ends: 12.10.2013