Monthly image: Discovering Masculinity (Smells Like Blue or Orange (Not the Fruit)) by Viljami Nissi

Viljami Nissi: Discovering Masculinity (Smells Like Blue or Orange (Not the Fruit)), 2019, pigment transfer on varnish and plaster, chain, chewed up chewing gums, sugared noodles, boxes of bananas, marble-dc-fix contact film, plaster, cable ties, steel, chicken wire, building materials, photo manipulation on canvas.

Every now and again I make the mistake of taking myself very seriously – that happened again while doing my artistic Bachelor´s thesis. Understandable, of course, as I am about to graduate and have to show the institutions and the world what I´m capable of.

When such momentary lapses occur, it´s best to bring yourself down to earth again. Now it happened with a small-scale installation experiment related to my thesis: I took the ready parts waiting in my workshop to the gallery premises to see what the final work of art would potentially look like. To my relief, the whole thesis looked stupid.

I remembered again what my working is all about: lightness and irrationality.

My artistic thesis is a whole consisting of printouts, boxes of bananas and plaster sculptures, shadowed by ten frames of plaster relief cartoon monument hanging on chains. Here and there you have noodles that have dried on-site and now hanging down. Everything is decorated with tribal tattoos. The masculinity repeated in pictures and sculptures is unattractive and fanatically eroticized.

Usually my working starts from a random idea, followed by a momentary feeling of genius. Due to that feeling I´ve started to work with determination, without any conscious questioning. At some stage – totally unnoticed – some kind of harmony has been reached and each element has a meaning, possibly seen by me alone, but a meaning, however.

When a spectator sees my work for the first time, I don´t need that the spectator would understand at the very moment what the work is about – I haven´t understood it immediately myself either.

When a spectator sees my work for the first time, I don´t need that the spectator would understand at the very moment what the work is about – I haven´t understood it immediately myself either. Maybe the right way to understand the work is that there is not necessarily that much to understand. Or of course there is if you hold on and want to find it. There´s no must though.

Viljami Nissi ( born 1994 @Kannus) studies performance art for the 4^th and the last year at SAMK Kankaanpää Fine Arts Campus and will graduate with a Bachelor´s degree in Culture and Arts in summer 2019. Nissi works in various ways with sculpture, installation, video, image manipulation and performance.