MELSVA
06.11.2020-19.12.2020
     Artists:
Beatričė Mockevičiūtė and Gintautas Trimakas
     Curator:
Audrius Pocius

Due to the quarantine announced in the country in fight with the spread of COVID-19, there will be no public opening of the exhibition or other physical events in the exhibition space taking place. A special introduction video will be published on the opening day of the exhibition presenting the displayed works in more detail along with interviews with the authors. Accompanying photo and video content will also be published regularly over the course of the exhibition.

Blueish is an exhibition combining the works of two authors, Beatričė Mockevičiūtė and Gintautas Trimakas. The idea for the exhibition came up at the beginning of the summer of 2019, while observing the slow-moving vault of the sky reflected on the steel surface of Mockevičiūtė’s work Asukas exhibited in the CAC yard. This somewhat overly free and slightly haphazard association with Trimakas’s photographs from the cycle City. A Different Angle became an impetus to think about the relationship between the works of these creators. The frivolous observation eventually revealed a creative conversation between two unique artists that had been going on for a while; two artists who, although coming from different generations and characterized by their own distinctive artistic style, share a cognate creative “hearing”; cognate, but not identical – linking the authors’ work by syncopation rather than a unified rhythm.

In their creative practices, both artists develop observational instruments and methods for capturing a special way of catching light, colour, and form, which gives these properties a kind of autonomy from the object to which they would otherwise belong. At the same time, this catch is in turn freed from the restless human gaze, able to see things only by defining them and giving them names. Trimakas’s photographs do not touch or interpret the objects being photographed, but rather testify to their silent existence, and the reflections of sunlight captured in Mockevičiūtė’s steel and glass works in turn do not become representations – instead, the author highlights their transitivity by making them performatively recur. While the results of these practices – ephemeral, abstract images – may seem inaccessible to the naked eye and as if sunken in their own inwardness, they also establish a certain moment of “here and now”, thus zooming in and revealing those aspects of the world that are usually blurred out and silenced by everyday life. For Trimakas, the photographic technique is a way to bring to the surface what in experience cannot be reduced to technology, while Mockevičiūtė looks at accidental reflections born in the relationship between light and architecture and gives them subjective properties, as if suggesting them to open their eyes themselves. By speaking to objects from different angles this way, the works of the two authors talk about what is inhuman, what is involved in everyday life only as the other side of the image or its negative, thus acquiring characteristics associated with nature.

This way, the exhibited works indirectly intertwine with motifs of the vault of the sky and its negative, balancing among them by capturing light or its momentary reflections and absorbing them on photo paper. While Mockevičiūtė’s installation covering the windows of the exhibition space refracts daylight, responding to the artist’s glass works displayed on the gallery floor, a new series of Trimakas’s works on the western poplar-coated wall accompanies the journey of the evening sun. The exhibition also features Trimakas’s interior photographs and Mockevičiūtė’s watercolours never before exhibited publicly, and over time will be supplemented with new works created in the exhibition space itself.

Artists:
Beatričė Mockevičiūtė ir Gintautas Trimakas

Curator:
Audrius Pocius

Ideas for the exhibition exposition design:
Laura Kaminskaitė

Graphic design:
Vytautas Volbekas

Text editing and translation:
Alexandra Bondarev

Exhibition installation:
Jokūbas Adamonis, Jurgis Paškevičius

Video content directing and production:
Jokūbas Čižikas, Milda Januševičiūtė

Photography and exhibition documentation:
Visvaldas Morkevičius, Laurynas Skaisgiela

The exhibition is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Special thanks to:
Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Agnė Kuprytė, Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė, Vaida Stepanovaitė, Rokas Vaičiulis, Anton Zolo

Partners:
Artnews.lt, Echo Gone Wrong, Kabinetas

Exhibition view: Blueish, Swallow, Vilnius, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Exhibition view: Blueish, Swallow, Vilnius, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Exhibition view: Blueish, Swallow, Vilnius, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Gintautas Trimakas, folded gelatin lumen print (fragment), 18 x 18, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Gintautas Trimakas, silver gelatin negative, 40 x 30, 2012. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Exhibition view: Blueish, Swallow, Vilnius, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Gintautas Trimakas, lumen print, 28 x 28, 2019; lumen print, 28 x 28, 2018. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Gintautas Trimakas, lumen print, 28 x 28, 2018. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Gintautas Trimakas, folded gelatin lumen print, 18 x 18; folded gelatin lumen print, 28 x 28, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Gintautas Trimakas, direct positive, 18 x 18, 2019. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Gintautas Trimakas, lumen print, 28 x 28, 2019. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish, paper, 4800 x 3750 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish, paper, 4800 x 3750 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish 8, glass, light, 700 x 420mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish 8, glass, light, 700 x 420 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish 8, glass, light, 700 x 420 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish 8, glass, light, 700 x 420 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish 8, glass, light, 700 x 420 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Blueish 8, glass, light, 700 x 420 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Bliueish 22, watercolors, 90 x 90 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Bliueish 22, watercolors, 90 x 90 mm, 2020. Photo © Laurynas Skeisgiela