Cover for Kedrostubùras song "Vanduo ir kiti geri dalykai". Inspired by play grounds, game-rooms in the malls, inflatables, and aqua parks.
Annotation and riso poster from personal show "Why my fingers are still sticky and my tongue still does not wash off" at 5 MALŪNAI gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Exhibition was part of "VDA graduation show" and "Culture night" programme in Vilnius.
Curated by Marija Marcelionytė - Paliukė.
Inspired by collective memory candies, toys, personal childhood experiences in OOs freshly free Lithuania. Unanswerable questions or maybe... questions that do not want to be answered. Walks in a state of childhood and creations influenced by longing for rediscovered toys, sweets, discarded furniture that has already been thrown away and people that remain in memory.
Creating has turned into a journey through bygone days. It started with small searches from the past: old, unexposed video tapes, photos, tablecloths or cracked, incomplete set of tableware.
There was a desire to capture in a drawing what I remember but no longer have, to appropriate it in this way, to "make it for myself", and later, when it subsides, to forget it. As if forgetting or letting is the next step after longing. Noticing the repetition and interweaving of my themes, as if they were continuations of unanswered questions, I realized that I was deconstructing my childhood: catching its fragments in order to delay them, the ones that I already forgot – reflect on them anew and to create the ones I do not have. In the exhibition, I want to transport to the recent past, to collect childhood experiences from those born in the new millennium through memories.
As if nothing seemed to change, but suddenly everything was different. Life in the yard, building dollhouses all day until a game that never happens, toys insidiously taken away, first injustices experienced, chalks on the asphalt, a tireless path to the grocery store and hands that is always sticky. As if what it was like to be a child in the 2000s: an explosion of chemically colored gummies, slimes, futuristic dolls and gums with temporary tattoos, only next to it is a silent line of personal childhood experience.
Exhibition documentation
⭣
Part of the creative project "Why my fingers are still sticky and my tongue still does not wash off": the canvases, titled "I'm sitting with my mother" and "I'm sitting with my grandmother" tells about a celebration - a same table set: special, rich and festive through the eyes of a child. With the perspective of the weightless state, I emphasize the uncertainty from which side of the depicted table is the person sitting, next to the mother or next to the grandmother. After the work has already acquired a visualization, I can start speculating about what (un)implicit episode I told myself.
Celebration is happening. Again. It seems. Šaltiena, silkė, silkė pataluose, įdaryti kiaušiniai, balta mišrainė. Nothing for me. Ah, i see šakotis and vafliukai. And ananasas candies in my grandmother's cut-glass.
Feast, 1012 dishes on the table, everyone is eating, tasting dish after dish, it will be hot soon, conversations are buzzing, statements are becoming bolder, someone is offended, someone is acting, I am sitting on my mother's lap, looking at the ever-changing table through its edge, grandmother, singing "oh, tell me, dear maidens" stretches out her hands, my mother passes me into her arms across the table, now she's already singing in my ear, that's how I get to the other side of the table, it's like the same thing, only different, like the same dishes, only from the other side half, a crystal vase, a huge crystal vase that was given to my mother and father by my grandmother on the occasion of their wedding, it contains a faded orange long rose, my grandmothers singing is interrupted by her mothers voice "da da da da dai da dai", while singing, she goes to the kitchen with a sly dance to get one more bottle of "citrinūfkė".
Closeup of "I'm sitting with my mother" and "I'm sitting with my grandmother".
Canvas, gelatine, color pencils, 80 x 120 cm.
As babūsė is about to refill the bottle of "citrinūfkė", the table audience sings and claps with cunning flair.
Animation from 272 frames.
In the midst of Joninės celebration.
A moment and thoughts behind the table.
My grandmother Janytė demurely laughs and admires her youngest brother Vacys playing accordion in such emote, heartful way, she thinks.
In the middle there - sits another sister - Adelė. From such happiness she finds everything so funny, especially how their brother Vacys handling the instrument, ah, how funny it is, they think.
Just Adelė laughs not in a demure way.
Animation from 142 frames.
sound on for the experience
Small animations from lost but recovered memory.
"My mother is feeding me some kind of baby porridge while in the background {stasys povilaitis - metų turtas} is playing."
Animation from 59 frames.
WHY DOES IT SOUND FAMILIAR
First memory being one and a half years old. Toy under the Christmas tree. I don't remember anything else, only my plastic piano, and the feeling, that pure desire of a small child, admiration for the toy, when you gasp with your eyes and let out a soundless surprise. I didn't let go of my plastic piano for a long time, insisted that it would be taken to all "other" Christmas celebrations, whether it was at one grandmother's house or another. The piano player had several demo versions of the tunes, only one of them had something indescribable to me, as I listened to it non-stop. Even after some time, until now, I caught myself dreaming about the Melody and about my Plastic Piano, but I could not revive it with the touch of the present time, only in past memories.
WHY DOES IT SOUND FAMILIAR - a cracked old set dancing to a plastic piano demo Melody discovered during the creative process. When I found it, I couldn't confirm to myself that it was really the same melody, but I felt something so heard, so close, accompanied by alsmost too good, immediately confirmed inner knowing where the notes of the melody would go every time. And I had my lost tune again. During my early childhood, ~ 2005 – 2010 toys such as ringing phones, radios, mini TVs were the most popular. Lost/found melody is a phenomenon of collective memory: I played it without any explanation, only with a request that the listener tell me what he heard. Most of the people experienced similar childhood periods claimed that they associate sound with nostalgia, childhood, toys and colored plastic.
However, the most important part of the investigation was my mother recognizing my Melody. After all, in childhood we often create our own scenarios, events, we tend to store in our memories the stories we believe in, although we don't know if what we think actually happened. In this case, my mother was the only person who could recognize the Melody of my plastic Piano demo and confirm that my memory was not mistaken.
"and then there were 4" / bratz series
Cloe / Angel
One of the 4 main Bratz doll identities.
Personal symbol of the supposed wealth of past time. I remember them being specially protected, collected, dreamed of.
“At the beginning there were 4” - a cycle of 4 pastel drawings depicting the first Bratz dolls: Cloe, Jade, Sasha and Yasmin. I drew them according to emotion of memory: as if without avoiding to deify, magnify their intense gaze. I want to tell about the beginning: like the first mytho or hindu goddesses, from whom, later, the entire dynasty emerged, connected by ties of kinship and having its own genealogical tree.
To date, Bratz has released 140 different characters in doll form.
Yasmin / Pretty Princess
Doll as a holy icon.
With whom we share similar periods of childhood and collective memory, told stories about dolls, reminiscences associated with them - longing if they no longer have them or contrary - pride if they preserved them until now.
Motive for depicting them is a strong desire to have them again. As if I had to have them in such a way that no one could take them away from me, my "friend" would not "accidentally" take it away in the yard, or I would not accidentally leave them in kindergarten, never daring to admit that it was mine. As if in this way, it will take on another form, which will act as a childhood self-therapy.
The doll is like an icon, like your holy picture, with piercing eyes fixed on you, following, hung in the corner of the room, blocking the intersections of the edges. Like self-irony and a real, genuine, hidden and forgotten sore. Or perhaps it is brought to the surface and completed childhood desire to own.
pastel on paper 700 x 700 mm
