Found ideas 0
In brief: Gytis Skudžinskas' exhibition Several truthsofphotography, which is taking place in Kaunas at the Post gallery, from March 3 till 15, can easily be considered as yet another "exhibition of photography." Author does not create new images, but aims at looking critically at the role of the image in today's culture overfilled with images.
G. Skudžinskas does not investigate the world around us by photographing it, but explores the photography itself. "Practically, he is not interested in an image as such; he cares more about its guts, the internal mechanism or a place in some kind of wider contextual system," says contemporary culture researcher Jurijus Dobriakovas.
G. Skudžinskas' works also lack the pretentious seriousness or additional "ornaments" of conceptual thought. On the contrary, what is characteristic of his work is an almost punk-like humor. The meaning of works is sometimes very clear and simple and at the same time anecdotally apt. Even the classical methods of conceptual art author uses much more freely than allowed by the "genre" traditions.
On the other hand, the conceptual ideas of G. Skudžinskas' works usually have a clear link to very specific life reality. This is due to the author's attention to the materiality of work, the material properties of image retaining media and (however paradoxically it would sound in the context of contemporary art) the uniqueness of art objects. G. Skudžinskas reverses the normal relationship between the photographic material and the image captured in it. Such inversion literally takes place in the artwork Album - in the collages of found photographs presented in the wooden boxes. The most important thing here is not the image, but the photograph, as a material object.
If giving prominence to old photographs as unique objects reminds us of the tendency of the time that has passed to idealize the events of the past then clippings of the photo paper used in contemporary digital laboratories that surround the entire gallery space with an infinite strip point more to the monotony of today and standardization. The name of the installation made out of photo paper used for printing tests is Casual settings. It is both - a technical term and the name of the artwork and also a metaphor of our everyday life. Thus, it is not the image, but the photographic material itself that determines the nuances of meaning in the G. Skudžinskas' works.
