A staged reception space within a gallery booth
The “Meno Parkas” gallery booth at the ART VILNIUS art fair was temporarily transformed into a reception room, equipped with the standard elements of a booth – walls, spotlights, and signage.
At the center stood an aged, cultic sofa, formerly from a gallery office in Kaunas. The entire booth floor and the sofa were covered with a layer of fir needles, forming a carpet that carried the characteristic scent of a conifer forest, drifting beyond the booth’s boundaries.
Two exhibited artworks – a video ORBIS_CLOCK with clock sound and a framed archival pigment print of a video still on Hahnemühle paper – were positioned on the side walls, referencing the form and function of a wall clock.
Throughout the fair, artists, gallerists, and visitors moved through the booth, assuming the positions of collectors, guests, and potential buyers. At times, these positions subtly reversed: a person seated on the sofa became both host and guest, observer and observed, occupying a temporarily privileged place within the rhythms of the fair.
The main element in the space, the sofa, provided a mix of sensations: soft upholstery under the body, unexpectedly interrupted by the needles beneath. The booth functioned as a sculptural environment, giving temporal suspension, gently questioning the sofa as both piece of furniture and podium, and offering a brief moment of escape or recreation while literally sitting on needles.
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ORBIS_CLOCK is a conceptual time-based work from an ongoing stop-motion series. At its core lies a long-term video project depicting a rotating fir tree recorded over the course of one month under consistent light conditions. Composed of thousands of individual frames, the work establishes a visual correspondence between the axial presence of the tree and the second markers of a clock.