2017 solo exhibition @gallery Huuto, Helsinki

Mirka Raito’s exhibition Loose Things consists of collages and paintings made of found pictures, sketches, incomplete works and photos that were still laying around in her archives, waiting for the next step. The first impulse for the new works came from an urge to clear and clean up, to sort the things which at first glance seemed to be just loose. There is something playful and meditative in putting pieces together without an urgent instinct for storytelling or the necessitity to argue for a connection between loose parts. Raito is interested in portraying worlds of the subconscious and working associatively.

Mirka Raito gets impulses from motives that disturb or fascinate her. Perhaps the motive awakens a childhood memory, feelings of tenderness, hate or hope. In her collages one can find many overlapping pictures as in a falsely combined puzzle. The pictures hide other pictures or something has been cut out of them. The viewer’s gaze collects landscapes, faces, eyes, plants and constructions in the guts of the fragmentary pictures. Sometimes there is only a few lines, a crisscross or a sketch left after the process and we are luckily back at the starting point.