SAMI LUKKARINENProfile 14.8.2010 – 5.9.2010

The stars of this exhibition are teenage girls their heads upside down, people who hide behind the flashlight and young people who have created layers upon layers on their self portraits.

For the pixel portraits I have painted I have gone through thousands and thousands of profile pictures of the Finnish users of social media. The most interesting of those I have chosen for the subjects of my oil paintings.

In Facebook, IRC-gallery and in many other websites the profile pictures have an important function. The use of these pictures can be very creative. In my newest paintings a change in the users of the Internet is visible; the active users of the social media are mainly young women.

The exhibition will also present a series of paintings One to one. In this series I have painted small pictures of the profile pictures of my Facebook-friends in the scale 1:1. Even though the profile pictures are extremely small on the websites, they can still give a strong impression of the user. The mobile use of the sites makes these pictures even smaller. The size smaller than a matchbox, will force one to view the paintings from a close distance.

Sami Lukkarinen