#site-specific, foam-pixel relief
STILLEVEN_11 Stills is a retrospective solo exhibition conceived for the Meno Parkas gallery space in December 2017, held in my hometown, Kaunas, Lithuania. For this show, I created an arrangement of 11 works, intertwining early video works, time-based pieces, sculptures, and new site-specific works. All works are orchestrated as still-live elements, building together one new story. The visitor’s gaze catches two to three works at once and is guided by light, sound, and scent. This show is about memories and includes not only my personally significant elements, but also our Lithuanian collective memory, overlapping art history and individual city history.
As some works were created from burning candles, there were changes during the exhibition’s runtime, displaying the whole space as a still life – without stopping, a permanently changing setting.
1/11 STILLS:
Still Life with Cans, a wall piece created in situ for this show, is a site-specific foam-pixel relief. I rebuilt significant modernist buildings of Kaunas that, over a long period of my youth, shaped my perception of architecture. In this work, I turn individual architecture into a typical still-life tableau, displaying buildings as cans.
There are two very personal references involved in this setting. My early interest in art was shaped by the local museums of Kaunas – the Picture Gallery with old masters and still-life paintings – and by the architecture of the Kaunas city center, where three museums were located. As I started my artistic journey in the Department of Ceramics and Glass, one of my early works was a porcelain service, which I enlarged in this depiction, placing it on the right side of the work as a reminiscence of this period and, at the same time, as a homage to Giorgio Morandi, whose bottles and cans deeply fascinated me during my studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.