2020 03 15 – 04 18. Arunas Kulikauskas „Photo objects 1995 – 2020”

When you wake up and try to write down the memories of your dream, you use many everyday words, but it’s hard to convey that alternate reality, that just encountered feeling where everything seemed so real.

Real, but not quite, just like it was for Alice.

Sometimes, when you see a thing from the past, many memories, details and faces fly by. The item becomes covered with images from your memory.

The reality that surrounds us is not a “hard” one; if we eliminated all of the pockets of air, all of humanity would fit inside of a sugar cube…, and so, that’s why it’s very easy for us to easily pass through a wall, we only need to “harmonize” the atoms of our body and soul.

The light of the Sun travels to the Earth only a bit over eight minutes, the light of the stars in the sky sometimes travel up to thousands of years, but that is not Now.

Please don’t take this seriously.

If there isn’t any reason for you to go to the exhibition, then don’t, there are all kinds of other important or perhaps even financially profitable matters at hand for you.

Why do I do any of this?

So that you’d be able to see it.

Who needs it?

No one.

Except me.

Polaroids are really good for that.

Arūnas Kulikauskas

A.Kulikauskas was born in 1959 in Žaliakalnis, Kaunas. He completed the J. Naujalis Art School and the Vilnius Fine Arts Academy. He worked in Lithuania, travelled around quite a bit of the Soviet Union’s areas, cities and mountains, took a look around the Polar region and Siberia, was active in the cultural life of Lithuania at the time and in the Sąjūdis independence movement. After Lithuania re-established its independence in 1990, he left to live in New York in the USA. After many long wanderings seeing the world and loads of adventures, after 22 years, the artist and his family returned to live in Lithuania, in the village.

The artist has had several solo photography shows and has participated in a great number of joint exhibitions around the world. His works are held in the collections of various museums, galleries and personal art collections. His photographs and techniques have been published in several books.

During the last 15 years, A. Kulikauskas has mostly worked with Polaroid materials. His art is multi-dimensional. Using a combination of pinhole and Polaroid techniques, the photographs that he creates tell a story of the artist’s conceptualism and his search for a style that is completely his own. The pinhole technique is one of the simplest of photographic techniques – all you basically need is an old empty match box with a hole in it, you don’t have to search for any cameras or film, you can project the photograph directly onto paper and pieces. A. Kulikauskas does not work with the usual light sensitive paper, but with the fleeting and momentary Polaroid materials that run contrary to the primitiveness and asceticism of pinhole materials. This results in experimental photographs with the photographer’s titles in English often beneath them. The works seem very personal, sometimes it’s uncomfortable to even look at them – they make you feel as though you are going through a stranger’s drawer of personal items. As the artist himself says, his things are “covered in memories and meaning.” You can’t understand why this is so and where it is going. But, it’s certainly interesting. The art critic Dr. Agnė Narušytė defined this type of technique as “The Aesthetics of Boredom” (Vilnius Fine Arts Academy publication, 2008). She stated that the pieces of art of A. Kulikauskas and other artists who think and photograph outside the box “then become the boredom of the everyday, the most banal expression of it, a void, the slowing down of time and boredom itself.” There is “nothing going on” in the works, their structure is a matter of chance and the message is that the text has become mixed up between meaninglessness, silence or contradictions.“

The opening of the exhibition will take place on March 13, 2020 at 6 PM at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center at Malūnų g. 8 in Užupis. Come one, come all and bring your friends!

JMVMC

www.mekas.lt