Elena Grudzinskaitė | Haunting Durations | 20/12/2022 – 20/1/2023
In the exhibition Haunting Durations, through the means of prints and installations, artist, Graphic art department lecturer Elena Grudzinskaitė presents visual interpretations of publicly accessible landscapes, objects as well as paysages constructed in intimate settings.
The author researches the notion of the monotonous/conventional everyday landscape: what could be denominated as a landscape in fundamental terms, and how minute fragments of situations and their agglomerations can form into another, rather distant from its conventional concept, but still – a landscape.
The works presented at the show carry recognisable monotonous images a person / dweller / wanderer / traveller registers in their everyday as the peripheral sight registers mundane objects, situations and elements of the landscape that are often on the sideway or simply on the side, in quotidian routine – something to be passed by, passed through and around, ignored, yet constituting a medium of unadorned and current reality.
“Aside” is a series of photopolymer etchings, created from a collection of images of artificial mountains – mounds, hills or humps – that have been temporarily mounted in city environments due to various industrial or social circumstances. In the show, the series presents an opportunity to reflect on human relation to their environment, the effect the temporality of the objects brings to the aesthetic sensation of the landscape, and what shifting results are heralded by the constant anthropogenic processes transforming the environment.
Both, the kinetic object “Mono-tick” with an over 20 meters length collage, and a series of photopolymer etchings “Cut-outs”, are assembled out of 20 000 photo fragments of a year-worth artist’s photographic archive. In the show, they are presented as a synthesis of the environment’s semblance, an extended landscape that absorbs the flow of time, events, occurrences and routine.
The exhibition is supported by the Vilnius Academy of Arts, partially supported by the Lithuanian Council of Culture.
Elena Grudzinskaitė (born in 1987, lives and works in Vilnius) graduated from MA Graphic Art at Vilnius Art Academy in 2012, and since 2015 works as a lecturer at the Graphic Art Department of the VAA. She has been participating in local and international art projects since 2010, and is an active participant of international interdisciplinary art exhibitions, biennials and triennials, has presented her body of work in 6 personal shows. Alongside, she organises projects promoting graphic art, curates visual art shows.
In her artistic practice, Elena analyses the relation among an individual, territory and the surrounding environment, as well as marginality and fragility of time and space parameters, and human impact on physical modifications of the environment. She is also interested in the concept of landscape that levitates somewhere between culture and nature, reality and fiction. Her works often acquire the shape of the transformed and synthesised landscape, thus becoming a condensate of reactions to the surrounding physical, social and cultural environment, like thoughts, reflections and inner discussions that have obtained visual expression.
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Photographs by Light Stroke Photography
