'Totems' by Jaak Kikas at the Tartu Art House

2020 07 03 — 2020 07 26 at Tartu Art House
Author Echo Gone Wrong
Published in Events in Estonia

On Friday, 3 July at 5 p.m. Jaak Kikas will open his personal exhibition of photo(de/re)constructions “Totems” in the small gallery of the Tartu Art House.

The artistic vision of Jaak Kikas is certainly influenced by his educational and occupational background as a physicist. Symmetries, reflections, experiments with the elements of physical reality are important keywords in physics. However, the exhibited photo manipulations give the viewers an opportunity for exercises in pareidolic thought games, enabling them to become co-authors of the works and to see in the images their own hopes, expectation and fears.

The artist adds: “The world and the things in it can be taken apart. In thoughts as well as in reality. In reality all of us have done this at least in childhood, occasionally with punishable results, when we failed to put the things back together. Sometimes, however, the new ways of combining the constituent parts may result in a surprise or even yield something useful. Indeed, all the infinite variability of the material world stems from the different ways the individual atoms are bound together. In these images, the world has been cut into two halves: one of them is thrown away and replaced by a mirror image of the other half. This, of course, is not (or maybe it is) nothing new: the collage has been used in art history for a long time. And there exists quite a direct connection with the images from my earlier collection ‘Catoptromania’. This time, however, I go further. And the result … well, was surprising at least for me.”

Jaak Kikas (b 1949) is a physicist and artistic photographer. In 1972, he graduated from the Physics Department of the Tartu State University and is currently affiliated with the UT Institute of Physics. His first personal exhibition “40 images” took place in 2015 in the Pallas Art Gallery Noorus. The current exhibition is his seventh collection. Since 2019, Jaak Kikas is a member of the Tartu Artists’ Union.

The exhibition will remain open until 26 July.