Andreea Saioc,

Editor (Art)

 

What are the things one is most afraid of? Certainly there are all sorts of private emotions, but sometimes we discover the object of our fear to be fear itself. By institutionalizing the notions surrounding fear, society has done nothing but to separate itself from what is human in nature. Every emotion, that is not joyous, is repressed and unclaimed, as if all the fears that are left unexplored come naturally to a resolution. A society is made of both humans and monsters and sometimes every day can be Halloween, but fear can be exorcised  And one of the best ways you can deal with it is art.

Mia Makila is a Stockholm-based artist and art historian, who describes herself as the ‘love child’ of Pippi Longstocking and Swedish movie director Ingmar Bergman. Her work includes paintings, digital collages and mixed media. Her main influences are to be found in the work of film directors David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcook, Roy Andersson and Tim Burton, who give her art a ‘very cinematic quality’. Makila also attributes her inspiration to 13th-17th century artists like Pieter Bruegel the elder or Lucas Cranach, more recent artists such as Francisco de Goya and Frida Kahlo and also to ‘the masters of the Disney Studios in the 1930′s-40′s

Makila creates art around the major themes of fear, anxiety, fury and grief, all with a pinch of salt, making her ‘demons have fun on the canvas’. Her style can be seen as an original blend of horror pop surrealism and dark lowbrow. On the other side, Makila labels her work as mostly neo-Victorian horror art.

She says, “I paint my demons. I paint nightmares to get rid of them. I paint my fears. I paint my sorrow to deal with them. The motifs of my artworks are scary and macabre but they also have a dark sense of humor. I love to use humor in a weird and strange way.”

Her art is somewhat playful, however inherently realistic. The viewer is in a confused and dark, yet, a rather animated mood, as Mia Makila’s art seems to be moving around motifs such as brightly coloured images of genitalia, putrefaction or blood. And it is this combination of a certain dreamlike quality with the crude and the visually repulsive that results in Makila’s signature style.

“I am very amused by the unexpected… I like the mix of emotions. I don’t like funny pictures that are staged or faked; I like the coincidental humor  when you have no control over the situation and it just accidentally becomes funny-like a joke made by the cosmos. My paper cut-outs become jokes of scary and disgusting combinations” she adds.