On January 15th (Friday) at the gallery “Meno parkas” (Rotušės a. 27, Kaunas) at 6 pm will be held an opening of the exhibition “Catching the Images of Time (Three Scenarios)” by three young artist from Vilnius.
We often talk about memory. Maybe because we have left so little of it? – would ask Pierre Nora. This question makes us think about disappearance. But disappearance of what? Actually, can we simply define the disappearance of our memories when we forget?
“Flooding” memories has been noticed for decades in artistic expression. Artists not only question, dramatise past events but just like small nations or groups who are seeking emancipation, they create small narratives, as if they were rewriting this big historical tale. Memory discourse is relevant in today’s Lithuanian art scene as well. In its own way it is touched by a generation of young artists and it is being expressed in the art of their own.
The exhibition – “Catching the Images of Time (Three Scenarios)” concept is based on different point of views and access to the phenomenon of memory itself. The exhibition involves three painters of the younger generation – Donata Minderytė, Petras Lincevičius and Eglė Ulčickaitė. They all use different artistic approaches, methods and develops authentic definitions of memory, time and identity. But they have one thing in common – pictorial media. It is their choice of medium which questions human temporality, memory processing, time perception and the selection of time.
Donata Minderytė seeks to immortalize memories of experienced time that have been made by the flow of time. That is to say, always discontinuing, self-dividing. Also constantly transforming and fading. The change of recollection or the process of disappearance for her becomes a mean to decode the flow of time by replacing the paused picture of memory into painting. By using means of painting Donata transforms image into noise (she borrows the term from cybernetic science). By that she tries to decode the meaning and value of fragmented and faded image.
Petras Lincevičius gets inspiration for his artistic activity from dynamic environment. Source for it, as he distinguishes, is specific ethnographic region in Lithuania – Suvalkija. The selection is determined by his search of identity. Petras creates a personal (existential) structure by using “mind palace” method, cultural memory and special artefacts. Media of painting allows him to connect experienced and inexperienced time while that expands interpretations of historical time and place.
Works of Eglė Ulčickaitė are carried out by the phenomenological research of time where she chooses as the object multi-cultural field af local context. She is taking the role of some kind of detective, generating hypothesis of parallel times. Following the traces of a past time, collecting them as evidences, she seeks to reconstruct – albeit imaginary – the script of the past events. Eglė identifies the media of painting with development of the facts – items of consciousness in these explorations. The creation of site-specific images in medium of painting starts to manifest as the time of a place for referent or present reflection.
The exhibition – “Catching the Images of Time (Three Scenarios)” – is like an existential dialogue. In the world of today’s, overwhelmed by new media, where virtual dialogues befall the collective memory with the flood of images, which creates simultaneity‘s illusion, keeps on strengthening the experience of separation, that was aptly named by Roland Barthes as these little touches of solitude. Participants of the exhibition aims to share this experience. By transforming their subjective experience of time and authentic reflections of passed time to particular scene – space for dialogue, they share their memories‘ scenarios with each other and the audience.
Exhibition will be opened till 6th of February.
Illustration: Donata Minderytė . SELFLESS
Exhibition is part of gallery’s project “The Young. Green Consciousness-6”. Exhibition and project are part-financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Kaunas City Municipality, company “Plasta”.
