Wow, here’s some work that just made my Friday all the sweeter. Finnish artist Ville Savimaa creates the most clean, beautiful, and bizarre images, filled with chunky, abstract characters and creatures, as if viewed through an old fashioned grainy, black and white lens. It feels a lot like the trippiest noir film you never saw. Even when colour occasionally comes into the mix, Savimaa manages to gracefully maintain that sculptural sensibility, leaving the viewer feeling as suspended as the characters themselves.

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Finnish artist Marja Hakala makes site-specific environmental art out in nature — parks, reserves, mountainsides — as well as in gallery spaces and interiors using materials she finds in the environments she chooses. Her repetitive forms impose human order as a sort of meditation on human absence. Just as Thomas Cole and J. M. W. Turner emphasized the puniness of humanity before God and the natural world, Hakala draws out the futility of human endeavors in a 21st century context.