An exhibition by artist Gerda Paliušytė entitled “For Cecil” will be opened at the Prospekto Photography Gallery (Gedimino Ave. 43, Vilnius) on Wednesday January 29th, 5:30 pm.
Cecil Robert is the founder and administrator of a self-titled YouTube channel where he uploads remixed songs ordered by the channel’s subscribers, sounding as if they were coming “from-another-room”. Creating this effect is rather easy – all you need is Pro Tools, Ableton or similar software to highlight the music’s bass, mute the high frequencies and add a reverb effect. After hearing Toto’s “Africa” (1982) at 3 am, modified by Cecil to sound “as if it were played in an empty mall”, writer and reporter from The New Yorker Jia Tolentino wrote about experiencing an unexpected mix of longing and comfort: “Hearing a song you love when it’s playing from elsewhere is a reassuring, isolating experience: you feel solitary and cared for at the same time.”
The “from-another-room” phenomenon and its experiences have become the starting point for the photography series “For Cecil” (2018 – present), exploring the possibilities of being together, sharing, tacit agreement and intimacy. The photos are sometimes sent to Cecil living in Kaukana, suggesting to use them as covers for the songs on his YouTube channel.
Gerda Paliušytė (b. 1987) is a video artist and curator who is interested in various documentary practices, historical and popular cultural phenomena and characters, their fluidity and relation to social reality. Some examples of Paliušytė’s films include “The Road Movie”, a story about the band’s “ONYX” stay in Vilnius (2015), “Desire For Things To Work”, depicting a night journey in Amsterdam voiced by telephone sex workers (2016), and “Nevermore”, a documentary about the legend of American writer Edgar Alan Poe in Baltimore (2020).
Exhibition design: Gabija Nedzinskaitė
Text-object in the exhibition: Raimundas Malašauskas
Editing and translation: Alexandra Bondarev
The exhibition is sponsored by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
