"Art e fakti"

"The body has left the building" is photo series about the realization that if emotions become too hard to handle, you need to get them out of your body. In the title of the series, there is a reference to the idiom Elvis has left the building, which is still often used in American culture. This sentence was used at the end of his public shows, making the audience understand that enough is enough, it's time to go home. At the time when this series was made, my body was tired of expectations, pandemic, didn't have the opportunities to discharge. The body was in a "enough is enough" state. Visually, I wanted to make a contrast between this impersonal body seeking discharge and a romanticized environment symbolizing freedom. The series began as a fascination with German photography collector Jochen Raiß's work Women in Trees, a selection of black-and-white photographs of women from the first half of the last century posing in tree branches. Something about it seemed very, very beautiful and very, very simple. I imagined that the body could enjoy being responsible for simple functions such as climbing a tree.

"Untitled obelisque" is a glorification of the skills of a man who grew up in a typical post-Soviet environment, emphasizing the understanding of a man as a typical hard worker rooted in the older generation. The author tries to reveal his hidden (?) masculinity by studying social and gender roles, asking himself, in which layer of the social hierarchy should the male artist be placed? Answers could be found in Art Academy of Latvia painting department behind the chronologically arranged piles of ceramic tiles, the production of which began in the late 1980s, symbolically echoing the author's life course and the maturity of his artistic practice. "Untitled obelisque" is a test of the author's physical abilities to find out whether the attachment to art and painting was genuine, or was based on a choice dictated at school and made due to the ignorance of youth, determining that it was necessary to become a builder, which would allow the author to hide the moldy walls of Soviet-era blockhouses, covering them with white paint and IKEA furniture.

When seeing a road sign while driving, every driver knows within a second what it means and acts accordingly. No one even really thinks about it and follows the instructions on the road sign automatically. It's interesting because it's hard to imagine that in everyday life. Sometimes you don't want to let someone in front, you want to go first. Sometimes you want to go in a forbidden direction. When you roll a dice, you never know what number will come up. Exactly the same with the road traffic dice. You never know what sign will await you around a corner.