artists info:
SIIKALA
Siikala reaches for ecstatic nausea with conflicting elements. He utilizes painting techniques by mixing traditional layer painting and the coarse side of popular imagery in the vein of 70's American photo realism. As raw material Siikala uses amateur pornography. He copies the original models quite faithfully favouring strict cuts through human figures as compositional brutality. The same unintentional spirit of mercilessness can be seen in the errors of pixelated digital images that he has used as models. The selected images are tuned up with more or less intuitive elements and references to medical illustration. In his latest works he has included expressive painting style as contrast to realistic details, yet still trying to avoid too much creativity and stylizing as a humanizing factor. As a side-product, there emerges reflections of current trends in the same wretched style as in eurotrash and exploitation cinema. Consequently Siikala labels himself as a trash artist. He also experiences resemblance with extremist noise music.
MARKKULA
Markkula's manifest of intent can be summed up with a few simple words: Hate and Lust. Filth and Violence. His passion to explore primal brute interests crosses over expressions through sound, photography, collages and videos. Markkula's output is perfectly consistent in it's exaggerated anti-art qualities. His technique is savagely atrocious, manipulating the lowest forms of art. Grainy low quality xeroxes, video stills, consumer level digital camera images, internet site print-outs, magazine clippings. Crudely glued, plastered, taped or stapled with very little attention to the qualities appreciated in fine arts. This approach removes substance from the context of eye candy into mere subject matter. His matters of interest are a psychotic mix of sexualized racism, racialized sexuality, sexualized violence, sexualized political extremes. His work operates on the level of exaggerated offenses. It rejects the satire of contemporary, supposedly wacky yet provocative "unpop" art as well as it rejects the whole notion that his work would be anything more than it is: Hate, Lust, Filth and Violence.
ASPA
Aspa seeks to portray urges and interest from a predatory and masculine angle. The majority of his body of work revolves around themes of degradation and abuse spiced with an extensive amount of decay. His work aims to destroy any elements of an actual person's ego or mundane being and transform everything into objects of pure aesthetic value. His work focuses often on the theme of decay. Be it moral decay, the physical condition of portrayed object or its surroundings. And finally also on the technical qualities. Subjects include focus on "unprofessional" human nudity and obscene displays of perversions, which seek to distance sexuality from simulations of pro-creation. The sexuality portrayed always involves a predatory or voyeuristic angle. There is zero attempt to normalize deviancy or seek acceptance for bizarre desires. The Anti-Social aspect of pornography remains exactly the opposite. It loathes the apologetic approach of "sex art activists".
The study of decay also includes dead animals, abandoned industrial sites, discarded waste that once was a sign of advanced civilization, decaying untamed and untouched nature. The texture of decay is of major importance. Instead of perfect balance, the focus is on bleak harmony of contrasts, textures of micro level organic elements of wear, tear and damage. His collages focus not only on the image itself, but most of all on torn edges as well as stained and wrinkled paper textures. His output is almost exclusively black and white or mildly toned. The photography is often raw and sometimes also developed with hand made chemical prints which celebrate the magical spontaneous imperfections. His paintings and illustrations are bluntly naive, seeking nothing else than to portray the idea of a specific act or object obsessing the creator's mind.
Aspa considers himself as a Seer of Decay, who accepts and celebrates the role of a gutter artist and providing conflict of mind. The illusion of a new dawn is so distant, politics often enter only as a side-product and most often as uncomfortably and coldly inhumane as the rest of the work.
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