The exhibition ‘The Boundaries of the Book Body’ by Rasa Jančiauskaitė will open on March 25th at 6 PM at the VAA Gallery ‘Artifex’ (Gaono St. 1, Vilnius). The exhibition will be on view until April 25.
The exhibition by book designer, illustrator, and Vilnius Academy of Arts doctoral student Rasa Jančiauskaitė explores the process of book creation and its boundaries. She invites us to examine the material body of the book—does such a boundary even exist? The artist investigates how and why the visual language inherent to the book format extends into other media. As American book artist and visual culture theorist Johanna Drucker states:
“A book is a received form endlessly reconceived to serve the vision and function of its new author, a form in which we all participate, reshaping its identity in the search for our own, experiencing its specificity in our desire for communicative exchange, working through its finitude in our need for a mortal expression of our own bid for immortality […]”
Johanna Drucker (2004). The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books, p. 364.
In this exhibition, Rasa presents two newly self-published bibliophile books, Creative Camel and Fool of Hope, printed using the risograph technique (a stencil printing method for small print runs). She also showcases works, sketches, and results of visual procrastination—pieces created between projects as a free-flowing journey of creative thought. These works are part of her doctoral research project, Primal Expression in Visual Communication Design. The artist invites us to embrace the vitality of the creative object—not to objectify it but to allow it to expand, transform, and transcend the boundaries of the book format. She humorously describes her creative process as a camel without a head or tail—an endless, undulating, and ever-moving path.
Rasa Jančiauskaitė is a graphic designer, illustrator, and lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Department of Graphic Design. She earned her BA (2014) and MA (2017) from the same department and is currently completing her doctoral studies in design.
Her primary research interests include primal expression in visual communication design, book art, illustration, the boundaries of the book’s material body, and creative eros. She actively participates in exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad. Her books have been published in Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, South Korea, Japan, and China. Rasa writes, illustrates, and designs books. Her works Namai (2022), Ypatingas (2019), and Maži eilėraščiai mažiems (2018) have been recognized in Lithuania’s Most Beautiful Books of the Year competition and internationally. Her illustrations have received awards at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustration Exhibition. In 2020, she co-designed the visual identity of this fair in collaboration with the Italian design studio Chialab. She also curates exhibitions on illustration and book art in Lithuania and abroad.
