‘Emergence’ 2019 Oil on canvas 36 x 48
Photo courtesy of artist and Five Car Garage
Being raised in a multitude of cultures and countries, one might assume that Anja Salonen is comfortable in new places and easily adaptable. However, her art shows something else: alienation and confusion. The lack of belonging has allowed her to find avenues for self-healing, which are reflected on her canvasses. Intrigued by mythology and the cosmos, Salonen uses these topics as reference points to understand herself, conveying these ideas through her artistic imagination and prowess.
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**Tell us a little bit about your new exhibition _The Key of Chiron_.**
_The Key of Chiron_ points to the need for a personal journey of self-healing as a foundation for mass healing on the planet. Hovering above a panoramic painted mountainscape, the paintings each offer a portal into a specific psycho-spiritual state along the path of self-discovery, where my own avatar self joins with an array of animals and landscapes that hold the lessons required to move forward. The images are allegorically pointing towards a process in consciousness that is available to us all and has been mapped out by various cultures over millennia, but is only just beginning to emerge within a Western psychological paradigm. This process requires an integration of our deepest pain and an awakening from illusory definitions of self that have been inherited through societal structures of control and disempowerment, family dynamics, and intergenerational trauma. The Greek myth of Chiron embodies this archetype - as Chiron’s own wound leads him through the depths of the shadow to a space of compassion for the suffering of all.
‘Key of Chiron’ 2019 Oil on canvas 11 x 9
Photo courtesy of artist and Five Car Garage
**Your work has primarily dealt with the body and its relation to itself as well as space. Your sculptural paintings certainly make that apparent, however, this new work seems to look beyond that into something more metaphysical than physical. Can you tell us about where this shift comes from?**
My work has always operated as a healing tool for myself, reflecting the current positioning of my psyche and what I am working to understand at that time. One of my challenges in life has been a sense of disidentification with my body and the material world, which manifested itself in periods of severe depression, dissociation, and anorexia, leading to years in and out of psychiatric hospitals before understanding that no one was going to save me but myself. Studying, reproducing, manipulating, and reflecting my self-image and its boundaries in space back to me became a personal sanctuary for understanding the nature of the body, the precarity of an externally defined identity, and how we relate to others. This investigation moved through an interest in the masks we construct in the world, into this recent body of work which dives into what lies beneath those masks. My practice is a tool to begin to know the true self, and I have found that it lies in the inner space of the body rather than the outer.
**How are you using physical bodies as a vehicle for these metaphysical ideas?**
I am pointing to the way that we all use our physical bodies as vehicles for the metaphysical. The body is an organism rooted in time and space that holds and supports the eternal aspect of ourselves, and it is through the body, rather than in renunciation of it, that we may find a state of integration. There is a deep mind/body disconnect engrained in the duality of our dominant philosophical paradigm - and I have found that learning to expand my seat of consciousness to full embodiment of the body, as opposed to my earlier identification as a mind with a detached body, has brought radical shifts. It can be extremely challenging to make these quantum leaps in perspective because detachment is a protection mechanism that many of us learn in response to childhood trauma that served to keep us safe in perilous environments. This is where the _Key of Chiron_ can be a helpful reminder that we may hold that inner pain with compassion and connectedness to the pain of others in order to move through it into a space of healing.
‘Guiding starlight’ 2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 36
Photo courtesy of artist and Five Car Garage
**You’ve lived all over the place. You were born in Los Angeles, lived in Finland, Wales, London, and now you are back in Los Angeles. You’ve talked about how Los Angeles influences you, but have all of these physical moves in location influenced your work as well?**
Physical shifts in location, perspective jumps and cultural alienation have contributed greatly to my view of the world and my work. I was born in Los Angeles to a Finnish father and Welsh mother who expected their time here to be quite temporary. Their stay ended up spanning 17 years, throughout which a background sense of alienation and living on the outside of a foreign culture prevailed. My family communicated in a space of translation between Finnish and English, and as my siblings and I grew up as European Americans the cultural complexities at play mounted. Our return to Europe brought to light the American-ness that we had attained, and I became very aware of a sense of non-belonging that followed me wherever I went. This feeling has allowed me a level of objectivity and detachment in my observations of the societies around me, as from a young age I encountered multiplicities of meaning and learned that the same things may go by many different names. It has presented me with the challenge of finding my own sense of home and supportive role in a community, while freeing me to some extent from restrictive cultural constraints that I don’t agree to enact. Now, as an adult having returned to LA, that community is what I hope to build upon.
**How have mystic traditions influenced the way that you work?**
Throughout my life I have turned to philosophical literature and mystic teachings for guidance, time and time again. I have found self-knowledge to be the most empowering healer of all, and have sought to educate myself in various traditions of universal understanding. This work is always growing and along its path have been many dissolutions of previous world views. With the guidance of myriad teachers, I am endlessly seeking to break through the next layer of illusion and construct a life of authenticity and truth. This work is enacted on the canvas, in my thoughts, relationships, and choices.
‘Within the womb of the world’ 2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 72
Photo courtesy of artist and Five Car Garage
**You are referencing Greek mythology and cosmic bodies in the title of this show. How is the story of Chiron and the idea of healing communicated in this new work?**
The myth of Chiron and the planetoid that bares its name symbolize the need to confront our unprocessed trauma as individuals and as a collective in order to evolve as a species. Our society is operating largely within the logic of psychosis - evident on every level of our global political climate and our collective disregard for the Earth and all beings that we consider “other”. Our world is deeply traumatized, and the psychological dysfunctions at play are creating devastating atrocities. It is absolutely urgent and essential for this trauma to be confronted on a collective level, but this also necessitates its confrontation within each individual. Each individual is responsible for dismantling the various systems of oppression we have inherited within our own minds in order to dismantle these structures in the world. This series of paintings is an ever incomplete map of what I have learned through my self-healing journey and I hope that it may offer a light of recognition to others along their own paths.
‘Awakening baby bear’ 2019 Oil on canvas 48 x 36
Photo courtesy of artist and Five Car Garage
**Are you often inspired by ancient storytelling?**
I am very interested in the cultural role of mythology and what it fulfills. Ancient mythologies offered ways to understand the complexity of the human psyche as it interacts with universal energies along a path of challenge and growth. The fundamental archetypal forces of the unconscious were given characters and moved through conflicting narratives into clarity or resolution. These stories offer us invaluable guidance, unify aspects of the human experience, and define the limits, pitfalls, and expansiveness of the psyche through the use of symbol. They also create a unified narrative around our role within the context of universal life and how we relate ourselves to the Earth, the forces of nature, and those things we often perceive as separate from ourselves.
**How do you think you are writing your own stories with your work?**
The stories that I write with my work are not based in clear narrative progression, but in murky and indefinable psychological states. It is where I express psychic complexities that I would not otherwise know how to communicate.
**You’ve said that the sense of playfulness in your work is something you believe to be beneficial to everyone. How might your work be using play and humor for healing?**
Play and humor are essential to the healing process at the end of the day. This is demonstrated clearly in mythological narrative structure: just when the drama and omnipotence of the gods has swept you away, the trickster figure appears to add the dimension of self-referential mockery. They point to their own transparency, and thus to the transparency of the external God figures.
‘The bridge’ 2019 Oil on canvas 36 x 60
Photo courtesy of artist and Five Car Garage
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_The Key of Chiron_ is on view at Five Car Garage in Santa Monica, CA from October 26th to December 21st, 2019.
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