GalleriA features works from Sanna Kananoja’s new painting series Half-Year Mountains, in which she examines the relationship between the starting point and the painting process through repetition in her photography-based work. Each work in the series has exactly the same starting point, a photograph of a pile of snow. This image represents self-evident, functional, man-made and accepted everyday nature.

The six-month mountain range deals with local nature, focusing on the repetition of everyday life and the similarity of days and moments. The difference between looking at and seeing things is clear on a familiar journey. The theme is ordinariness: its safety, invisibility and unquestionability. Roads and their surroundings mean a huge amount of soil preparation. Rocks are blasted, trees are felled, soil is dug, and the flow of water is controlled. Most of the Earth’s land area has already been changed by humans. The small piece of the ground in Kananoja’s works represents this larger phenomenon. The starting point for the series of paintings is the systematic, inevitable views – piles of snow on the roadsides. They are a typical landscape in Finland for up to six months of the year. Small mountain formations rise in the flat landscape, which continue in the same way for kilometre after kilometre. Piles formed by the machine, simultaneously born, grown, melted, brown when spring comes. Piles of snow are not only snow, but also gravel, sand, salt and rubbish.

In everyday life, the landscapes in Kananoja’s works are not even thought of as real nature, but it is part of the built environment. In the paintings, the matter is reversed – in them, the viewer sees nature, it acquires an intrinsic meaning, and everyday environments become ideal landscapes for a moment. During the Romantic period, man was depicted as small in front of great forces of nature, for example, on the top of a lonely mountain. In her works, Kananoja depicts the same with everyday elements: humans act in order to control but nature seeks its own way, being small, big, wild and unpredictable.

Repetition brings routine and exposes to boredom as Kananoja focuses on the same sketch photo for a long time. The subject recedes into the background but is underlined at the same time. Change and immutability are constantly present in the paintings. They highlight the control and uncontrollability of the painting process, where the goal is always to start from the beginning.

Sanna Kananoja (b.1979) examines the relationship between nature and people through landscape painting. Her subjects are everyday human activities in our environment, such as blasted rocks and dug ditches. She uses egg tempera as a technique, building the works from several translucent layers. Kananoja’s works have been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions since 2007.

Meet the artist: Sunday 10 May 15-17.