EROSION 2006

Joana Deltuvaitė. "Relocation", 2005

Drew Gilbert, "Graffiti cafe", 2006

Ted Hiebert, "Incidental Self-Portrait #2", 2006

My work focuses on the narrative construction of identity – from rituals of selfhood to assertions of disappeared subjectivity to myths of otherness. Situated between discourses of photographic representation, psychoanalytic self-reflexivity and technological extension, my work seeks to negotiate the territory in which selves acquire a sense of themselves, or – perhaps better – a nonsensical self-relationship that seems to be the only effective way to deal with the uncertain questions of inevitable photographic mis-representation – a perspective from which the self (and the self-portrait) becomes an immanently unfamiliar phenomenon.

In this spirit, my work gravitates largely towards the lightless image – taken not through traditional photographic engagement with reflected light, but rather with self-illuminating, glow-in-the-dark body paint. In this way, these works bypass the mediating gaze of reflected light in favour of what photographers term "incident" lighting: direct exposure to a light source. The body literally becomes the light source for its own image, an image that (ironically) obliterates the body itself as anything except a literal frame for the paint. In this sense my work can be read as selfless self-portraits: portraits of a body that appears without appearing, whose disappearance is, in fact, the condition of its appearance in the first place.

Further, because the light emitted by glow-in-the-dark body paint is relatively faint, each of my portraits requires an exposure of 3-5 minutes, meaning that these bodies are not in any sense of the word static (although their image may be) but rather are represented over time. Here the temporal body is collapsed into a choreographed representation of itself according not to the instantaneous rules of photographic imaging, but rather the experiential rules of duration – that which photography proper can never properly represent.

Finally, in order to emphasize the profound artificiality of the image, my works mobilize highly ritualized bodies: crouching poses, stylized masks, and repetitive multiple figures – schizoid in the sense that the "self" represented is always and only a function of its dialogues with itself. Here the narrative of the image collides with and undermines the narrative of the self, assembled and disassembled in what seems paradoxically both a contrived and, at times, spontaneous relationship to itself.

Wilma Hurskainen

from cycle "Growth", 2003 - 2005

Growth is a project in which I am reconstructing and re-photographing pictures that my dad took of me and my three little sisters when we were children. I am trying to make the new photograph look as similar as possible to the old one: the place and the composition is the same, and so are our positions and facial expressions. The series consists of 30 pairs or photographs.

I have always been very attracted by the photograph´s ability to cross time and create this kind of comparisons. There is something sad, almost tragic, about looking at old photographs compared to new ones and seeing how people and things have changed or grown up. After all, it is said that time has been accepted as a common means of measuring life because people are not able nor willing to see the change in themselves. In the pictures it seems as if we were trying to go back to our childhood by accepting the same position towards each other, using same pieces of clothes, but we unavoidably fail. We have to fail – there is no return in time.

I am also interested in family photographs and the way they are taken, stored and (not so often) looked at. Anyone with any family history can tell that, although the family pictures are supposed to tell a story about a happy, unanimous family, growing up with other people is never simple. Family photographs can be a way of reflecting one´s past and identity, but the pictures conceal just as much as they reveal.

In the comparisons time takes a strange form – it feels as if there was a dialog between the past and the present moment, like there is in our minds what comes to our own memories. A memory is never static, permanent, but changes as we change. By repeating a distant moment something weird is revealed about us as objects of a photograph in the first pictures: the way we play our artificial roles for the photograph. We might not be more that 5 years old, but we already know exactly how to be in/for a photograph.

Arūnas Kulikauskas, "Cobble-stone road", 2006

Andrius Kviliūnas, "Photography", 2004

Michael Takeo Magruder "Encoded Presence", video 02'25'', 2005

The mobile phone has undergone an evolutionary progression from a limited and mundane communication instrument to a multi-functional device augmented with computer and photographic/video capabilities. Indicative of Weiser’s notion of ubiquitous computing, this hybridised technological set continues to permeate the entire social strata of the developed world and has achieved the distinction of primary transmitter of our digital selves. Generating transitory and ephemeral networks, the mobile phone mediates our most intimate of communications and exchanges – at all times and in all places – and continues to erode the actual and perceived divisions between public and private space.

Within this technological and sociological framework, there exists the potential to implement this medium as a mechanism to explore, critique and expand the conceptual and aesthetic structures within the classical genre of portraiture. Embracing the functionality of the mobile phone as transmitter of the self, can the inherent characteristics of these devices, ranging from their physical recording limitations to their low-bandwidth data format and consequential compression artefacting, become meaningful creative elements in a formalised artistic product? Does the fusion of these device-level qualities with the innate algorithmic processes afforded by the digital domain, affect the characterisation of the studied ‘individual’ by re-defining fundamental aspects of the creative process such as subject acquisition and artwork distribution?

Within this scenario, does such a portrait attain a greater or different ‘truthfulness’?

Paula Muhr from cycle "Absence", 2004 - 2005

“Absence” is based on the old photographs of my mother from our family album, which are combined with her comments. The most "innocent" photographs, on which my mother just presents herself to the camera, are re-enacted: decades later she poses in the same way, on the same location, reliving the past moment. By visually and verbally reconstructing my mother's photographs from the past I structure my family history, but also explore the relation between images of my mother from her youth and her own memory of that period. The arrangement of the images disrupts chronological narration, following the irrational structure of my mother's emotional responses. Although most of the appropriated images have rather idyllic overtones , her own accounts of them show that the memories of those circumstances are often unhappy. Her interpretation of the past is often influenced by her present emotions or reshaped by the experience of what had happened in the meantime and is, therefore, equally ambiguous as the photographs she comments. The meaning of private snapshots remains evasive even when the memory of the experience they document is still alive. As objects of intense emotional investment they prove to be equally fallible as our own memory.

Aistė Nesterovaitė, "Mirror", 2005

Sami Perttilä from cycle "Immobile", "Kotka 20.11.2005 at 17.41-17.43", 2006

Photography, by it’s possibilities and implifications, is similar to a child’s imagination. While the shutter is open, one can capture views and spaces that do not really exist.

In my childhood, there was a forest between my neighbourhood and a highway to Helsinki. In this forest, one could sense the signs of the times before suburbia. From there, one could find for example cow bones, rusted barrels, and other debris of rural era. The most exciting thing in my mind, however, was a rusty and moss-grown half of a car. Among the other children, I kicked the car, jumped on it, and tried to break everything I could. But, when I was playing by myself, I used to repair the old car wreck. I lifted the roof and held it up with canes. I recovered the car in my imagination.

The starting point for this project was an interest in the estetics of cars that had lost their shape. One can always tell the original shape of the car either by remembering or by means of imagination. The crushed cars present themselves as antropomorphic. One can find humanity, even faces, in them.

Pictures of decayed cars by themselves were easily dull, so I began to shoot in the night and to dramatize the objects by means of hand-held flash and other artificial lighting. During the several minutes of exposing time, I am able to paint the object and the surrounding nature out of the view.

To me, the night is the time of impersonation, it renders on sensible and makes the impossible achievable. The dark forest is a tabula rasa, the decayed car a boundary in a jungle of meanings and phenomena.

I create spaces and stages that would not exist without me. I am present while still absent. The camera remembers the event in its own logic. The final image is a two-dimensional surface where I can however dive into, in order to find my long lost playgrounds.

I photograph the boundaries of the industrial society and the ruins of modern life. Nature takes the sacrificed metal item into its tender embrace and lulls it into sleep. The speed has slowed down, but the car is still travelling.

Goliath Hansa and Elite Deluxe. There they lay, as mute witnesses to man’s dreams.

Kiki Petratou from cycle "Personae",2005 - 2006

Currently I have developed the interest to photograph people from different cultures and backgrounds depicting them in a semi-documentary style. I see every person as an individual with his/her own stories and histories, dreams and desires. In my photographs I try to capture those moments that escape from casual reality and reveal something of the ‘mythic’ profile of the photographed person. I subtitle the outcome, the photograph with the name of the person and the occupation (butcher, singer, housewife, etc.) but the picture is by no means evidence of that, rather it becomes a suggestion of the identity of the person, which I would like to call a hidden identity. I aim to construct moments in time where the people free themselves from who they are and what they are and become actors in their very own mise-en-scène. Their spaces become the stage and their poses bring up the possibility of a total new reality, a projection screen for extra imaginary scenarios.

Katarina Radovic from cycle "Constructed Realities", 2004 -2005

Charles Baudelaire recognized, in the „barbaric simplicity“ of toys, the enormous force of their approximation to the real. These staged photographs are questioning the relationship between the empirical world and the image of that world as projected by the media. So powerful is the manipulation by the media, with their artificial realities, that we are beginning to imagine the real world as we see it in pictures. Playing with the idea of „dislocated realities“, I am trying to explore the general human need to create mirror images for everything, and the way in which our perception is controlled by such mummifying representations. These images also witness to the existence of artifacts. Artifacts, as Philip K. Dick observed in a science fiction context, have enormous power to counterfeit the empirical and turn us into their faithful subjects.

In the world of toys and their simulated realities, everything is glossy and surprisingly without signs of dilapidation. It is a happy world.

Tuomo Rainio "City", video 02'44'', from seria "Tracescape", 2006

Tracescape is a series of video works about the social structure in public space. In the urban space every person’s behaviour is observed and controlled by the others and by themselves. Everyone has a possibility to step out from formal and differ from the crowd.

In these videos I have used computer program to draw the image out of movements on the video. Anything that moves in the video leaves a trace in the image. The most common pathways are multiplied in brightness as more movement occurs. By performing in the videos, I have drawn my own trace usually as opposite to regular movement. By doing this I have tried to make my route visible in the crowd.

In some videos you will see me forming a shape of a square or a circle by walking around a specific form. But in those that a visible form does not emerge, it is because my presence is faded by the quantity of others’.

Programming by Janne Pulkkinen

Sound design by Tatu Virtamo

Gytis Skudzinskas, from cycle "Y (Strategy of vertical view)", 2006

Tina Smrekar, "Work. A manual", video 07'55'', 2005

Alnis Stakle from cycle "Nothing personal"

The main object of the works from Nothing Personal is my body and its shadow. These works are documentation of peculiar performances. Why “Nothing Personal”, if visual content of photographs indicates subjective approach? Title of the collection emphasizes subjective interpretation of concepts, meanings, and visual images in the mind of a viewer. Observing one and the same images viewers interpret them building on their unique experience. On the one hand, works are subjective in their visual message. On the other hand, this subjectivity has meaning assigned by a viewer. Actually, these works represent universal symbol, code, and message in western visual art that are revealed in interpretation of representation of body and artist’s behavior. I highlight their two main meanings: the first, subjective satisfaction from photographing and photographs, and the second, ironical conceptual and contextual link between image and its interpretation in consciousness of a viewer.

Why ‘Square watcher’? Once I visited some of my friends in other city. It was evening, we were sitting and drinking vine near the fireplace. Then the host remembered that her friend asked her to burn images of her husband who died from cancer some time ago. So we burned his photos some his self-portraits. Watching how fire annihilated those self-portraits I realized that actually after us nothing more than few images remain for longer or shorter period of time. Thus, I want to dedicate this installation to the photographer who is nameless for me

Iveta Vaivode, from cycle "Portraits in blue", 2005 - 2006

Solo exhibition by Alvydas Lukys

“By the sea and elsewhere”

The author refused traditional Lithuanian photography reportage trend. The most important things in his art work were footprints of the past. The stagnant things caught in the photos, separated from the everyday environment, became the codes of the past. “As time goes by, its footprints stay in silent witnesses- objects”. Alvydas Lukys belongs to that group of revolutionary artists, which bravely overstep the limits of traditional photography. His art work much of the time balances between the genres of graphic, installation, site specific, modern media art and photography. The installation for this project, which connected the practices of photography, video and sound, was prepared with consideration to the originality of the Klaipeda Cultural Communication premises. Alvydas Lukys has presented more than 10 personal exhibitions in Lithuania and other European countries. He actively participates in group exhibitions, projects and seminars all over the world. Since 1997 he has been the head of the photography and media department in Vilnius Art Academy.

Group exhibition

"Memory"

The related theme of the exhibition is the intersection of past and today, artists take onlookers through the personal and collective labyrinths. Each work is an individual interpretation of this phenomenon.

Photo objects “For memory” by Jurgita Remeikyte had a personalized and intimate look to the past. Gytis Skudzinskas treated time distance as past experience. The Norwegian artist, Siri Harr Steinvik, and Ignas Krunglevicius looked at social memory, rituals, witches don’t allow to forget retrospective events. It has been a first time when Remigijus Treigys presented his work made not with photo camera, but used video camera. The artist “checked” the onlooker’s memory here and now.

Group exhibition

"Tactics of Waching"

To observe? To fix? To reproduce?

This exhibition presented young photo artists and authors of other disciplines, who employed photo instruments to make their ideas come true. “Tactics of watching” analyzes the relationship between an object and a photographer. Photographers Joana Deltuvaitė, Jurgita Gelucevičiutė, Kernius Pauliukonis, sculptor Juozas Laivys and an architect under the pseudo name “Personage No 1” dictate their own rules and thus the process of fixation becomes a clearly articulated critical and creative process. The authors’ look in this exhibition becomes a power that liberates the object and gives meaning to it.

People observed by Kernius Pauliukonis, stagnant in the scream, are trying to break the mute silence of uncolored photography. In his openly directed photos, the young author very straightly mocks the voyeuristic tendencies of today’s reality shows. To observe and to be observed- today it became not only an everyday phenomenon, but it has anchored as a parallel of our lives. The portrait genre was selected not accidentally. However, Kernius’ photos cannot be attributed to the traditional psychological portrait; it is more of a reaction to everyday increasing number of documental portraits. Faces became not only a symbol of person’s recognition but they have also been transferred onto a variety of documents proclaiming our social status.

Photographers Joana Deltuvaitė and Jurgita Gelucevičiutė are also observing the changing social reality; but their lenses are targeting the environment around rather than people. The transformation of the urban spaces falls in the horizons of Jurgita Gelucevičiutė. The changing relationships of the society and life conditions unfold into documentation that recreates space. The artist, while observing the architectural object, does not seek to transfer the viewer over there. Instead, she reveals the realities of modern life- a wish to survive and an ability adjust. Joana Deltuvaitė observes the environment as well, but she is not interested in the exterior, rather in the interior and every smallest detail in it. The author looks originally to “old and mangy” brand names and the domestic attributes that are mythologized by advertising. A rough portrait of everyday used things forms the image of their owners, which is often constructed out of cliché splits, formed by the mass media. As Joana Deltuvaitė says, “Those unpleasant, bored to death things seem to be born again. They are monumentalized as very important; maybe even the most important actors in the household, with their own lives and mystical existence”.

The most radical position has been chosen by Juozas Laivys. This author observes and fixates environment, but refuses mechanical reproduction of it. Juozas Laivys says, “I am creating a cycle of works, where a secret is highlighted in one or another way. A secret related to a specific event, which in the past happened to a specific task.” The artist clearly declares documentary and the reality of an event. But he does not provide the viewer one more reproduction of a reality.

And it seems that in the context of the modern art the observation of a “sunset by the sea” is totally impossible. As strange as it could be, such an idyllic and banal view inspired Personage No 1. Compounding two devalued values- a sunset and a palette of cheap supermarket aquarelle- the author presents a genesis of an intriguing visual adventure. Balancing within the limits of known and unknown, the artist invites the viewer to observe this scenery even more attentively, despite that is was probably seen a hundred times before.

Group exhibition

"Restart"

As an antipode to the previous exhibition, the participants are invited to demonstrate a different attitude to an object. Photography and modern technologies allows making reality images surreal, perverted, transformed or imaginative: hiperbolesed and subjective spaces, the worlds of objects, directed situations and unexpected perspectives; longing for someone and more perfect, transformed personal experiences.

Group exhibition

"The Story Continues"

The exhibition raises a question: is photography only an art of a caught moment? The works presented emphasize the opportunities of a photographical story. Every author of the exposition expands the fix genre of a moment in its own way. In such a way photographers not only embezzle the short reality moment, but also reconstruct reality into personal and intriguing stories. The artists chosen for this exhibition are different not only in their creative tendencies, but also in their experiences and reflect a very different palette of photo stories. Gintautas Trimaka and Regina Sulskyte, known not only in Lithuania, represent the creative photography. This year graduate of Vilnius Art Academy Ugnius Gelgaudas- a photographer of a young generation. And probably the most active photographers in Klaipeda region- Vytas Karaciejus and Adas Sendrauskas- unfold as the followers of a reportage trend.

Photo artists Gintautas Trimaka and Regina Šulskyte already for a long time in their works exploit the strategy of a story. A slip of time and space became the creative credo of the two authors. Usually in their works they combine two or more shots, which complement each other and using subtle hints take the viewers into the labyrinths of the authors’ ideas. Ugnius Gelgaudas representing the young generation seems to be continuing the same tradition, but his stories are more prosaic and bitter. The photos of Ugnius reveal the life of a generation grown in a modern urban environment. Vytas Karaciejus and Adas Sendrauskas, representing the coast region, borrowed the movie creators’ experience for their stories; fixating events shot after shot they consistently observe the flow of events.

Group exhibition

"Atention to Object"

On February 3rd 2006, The Klaipeda department of Lithuanian photo artists union’s presented an exhibition “Attention to the object”. The exhibition presented the young artists, who have been still studying or have just graduated from Vilnius Art Academy the visual design department in Klaipeda. One of the main goals of this exhibition was to provide a chance for the young artists to make a start in the professional art scene. Yet unknown authors unfolded as distinctive and original photographers. “Attention to the object” emphasized the attitude to the object that was typical to classical photography, but the view was presented as a document of an object. Promotional decisions made objects perfect, hyperbolized their importance and emphasized exclusive features; it gave them material sacrality. These young artists are balancing between the cliché of promotional photography and modern photography art. In the exhibition they integrated the best traditions of those areas.

Group exhibition

"Pinhole Tribe"

The exhibition presented photos made in pinhole, in other words camera obskura (Latin „a dark room“), technique. The bases of pinhole technique is light penetrating through the small hole to the darksome room and designing an upside-downed view. 2400 years back this principle was described by Chinese philosopher Mo Ti, but the true photographic description was worked out by Leonardo da Vinci in 1485.

The archaic technique, using only an obscured box with a microscopic hole in one of the walls, is absolute contrary to the modern digital view reproducing way. Today these working methods are a searching of individual and original artistic expression as well as a challenge to the dominant superficiality. The pinhole technique improves patience and concentration, skills and allegiance, gives opportunities of “other” photography language. Works, made by this technique, have more sentimental and broad-brush view neither the traditional photography.

Lithuanian artists: Gintautas Trimakas, Darius Kuzmickas, Tomas Vyšniauskas, Vaidotas Aukštaitis, Erika Dūdaitė, Edita Grėbliūnaitė, Linas Grubys, Božena Miežonis, Lukas Misevičius, Lina Mozūraitė, Andrius Naravičius, Eglė Navickaitė, Kęstutis Opulskis, Ornela Ramašauskaitė, Domas Rūkas, Tadas Sasnauskas.

Foreign artists: Slawomir Decyk (Poland), Steve Irvine and Drew Gilbert (Canada), Stig Rostrup Christiansen (Denmark), Peter Christensen (Denmark), Bard Kjersem (Denmark), Gerald Chors (Latvia), Igor Bryakilev (Russia), Magda Coomans (Belgium), Martnski (Holland), Massimo Trenti (Italy)