Gallery “apiece” that exhibits a single artwork of contemporary visual art and/or object of conceptual design at a time has moved into a new showcase-style building of small architecture located in the square of V. Kudirka and M. K. Čiurlionis streets. The gallery is planning to make the new location, en route to Vingis Park, its home for at least five years.
The first exhibition, which was opened on May 14, is organized by a duo of artists Viltė Bražiūnaitė and Tomas Sinkevičius. The artists have been working together since 2014, examining the way nature is influenced by social and economic structures. In the latest installation titled “Soft Target” and specifically adapted to the gallery’s space, the artists create compositions from beeswax and look at the ecological chains behind the yellowish waxy shades.
Wax is a widely used bee-made product whose colors depend on the pollen species of the plants and the region that the bees have visited. Bees are the most productive carriers of plant pollen, contributing to the maintenance of plant communities, diversity of the ecosystem and agriculture. To improve the quality of the harvest, farmers rent out bee colonies and temporarily set them up in their gardens during the blooming season. The journeys made by bees remain and can be seen in the semitones of the wax that is released.
Tomas and Viltė create wax compositions that in their diversity of colors are reminiscent of camouflage clothing or ammunition used for wildlife observation or hunting, which, just like the color palette of beeswax, are specific to each area. Among these abstract camouflage patterns one begins to notice silhouettes of vegetables that depend on bees – onion seedlings and cucumber shoots and buds.
Beeswax works are exhibited on a cardboard platform. The sides of the corrugated cardboard sheets used for packaging and transportation are reminiscent of bee honeycomb hexagons. Through “Soft Target”, the artists are observing the way cultural memory shifts, how patterns and images migrate, separating from their original uses and taking on new meanings.
The exhibition was open until June 21.
Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė and Aušra Trakšelytė
More information about Viltė and Tomas’ work —> https://paint-job.com [1]
More about apiece —> www.apiece.lt [2]
Photography: Vytautas Narkevičius