Artist Statement
Visually penetrating, uneasy, yet surprisingly familiar, my photographic images question the viewers’ assumptions about their relationships with the world. Honest examination and amplification of toys, mundane objects, and domestic debris creep under the audience’s skin utilizing aesthetic seduction as a means of attraction and subversion as a means of affecting.

 

 

Kati Toivanen grew up in Finland and came to the United States for her formal art education. Since receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992 Toivanen has been an active artist and academic educator. One of Toivanen’s nine solo art exhibition was favorably reviewed in Art in America and her works have been published and exhibited nationally and abroad. In addition, she has completed two funded site-specific public art projects and received several grants to support her creative production. In the spring of 2013 she was an Artist Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts developing a new body of work funded by the University of Missouri Research Board grant. In 2001 Toivanen received a Charlotte Street Award, an unrestricted artist grant in Kansas City.

In her work, Toivanen explores personal history and narrative through imagery, objects, and installations, often incorporating elements of play and games.

Professor Toivanen is currently appointed as the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. She previously served as the Chair of the Art & Art History Department.