Publishes,
Pictures & Words (Second Chapter),
Paulius Andriuškevičius
& Nicholas Kleindienst
(Download PDF)
https://busprojects.org.au/program/pictures-words-second-chapter text: Pictures & Words (Second Chapter)
Pictures & Words enquires into the individualism of artistic production through explorations of origins, meanings, and relationships between common literary and pictorial tropes. It seeks to land on the dark side of the imagination, prying into perspectives of identity and the subconscious through links between body and mind. Idiosyncrasies are acknowledged as driving forces in the telling of fragmented narratives, they are celebrated in the exhibition as conduits which allow one to traverse the frontier of the personal and the public. Arranged as a meeting of the personal within collective views, the second chapter of Pictures & Words extends from the first to deepen its contextual relationships with Melbourne and Vilnius.
Even though Rojūtė’s work, which employs words, painting and space, suggests itself as installation, its roots nevertheless mainly stem from language. Short, scattered phrases form a specific, visually perceived poetry. Its lines appear as if pulled out of a wider context; non-descriptive, they indicate a specific feeling rather than open into an elaborate narrative. A mélange of stolen random phrases, fragments of dreams (or perhaps nightmares), of erratic pieces of advice strangely connected to various prejudices and folklore, it speaks about those awkward situations, which are so painfully familiar to us all. Rojūtė is willing to address those uncomfortable states of mind, situations and feelings that we are so desperately eager to avoid, such as the constant fear of a possible great failure, disappointment, misfortune, or a timeless anxiety. Still, their work is neither dark nor gloomy. It rather reminds us of certain secret hiding spots from our childhood days that offer a safety cover, where strange things happen, but one always finds a way out via a total freedom of behaviour.
Excerpt from a catalogue text by curator Neringa Bumblienė for the 13th Baltic Triennial: Give Up The Ghost.
I arrived at the sanatorium to look for peace of mind, to catch a break. It was a transformative experience. I lived through the recuperation of my creative powers and, besides, I could, even if for a little while, silence the obsessive urge to justify and rationalise all of my actions. While belonging to the secret society called The Order of the Spur, I had stopped creating artefacts. Even when we were walking through the widest of streets we pushed on each other, huddled together and, unwittingly, brushed against each other, even if only with the spikes of our elbows, and it is precisely due to this reason why all the works which we created happened on the road, and only in our heads and memories. And whenever one of us attempted to start creating something material – writing, drawing, conceiving anything in a space or painting – the others would immediately engage their critical apparatuses and paralyse the desire for action (we called it taming). Everything would be preserved solely in wordplay and ritual dancing.
The text was written by Vytenis for his solo
exhibition Sanatorium which took place at Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2019.