Aistė Kisarauskaitė | Solanum tuberosum*

2018-11-27

„Solanum tuberosum*“
*potato

Aistė Kisarauskaitė

Interdisciplinarity manifests itself by different symbioses. In her work, artist Aistė Kisarauskaitė combines classical artistic disciplines with her interest in plants. It wouldn’t be an error to call Aistė a botanist, though in the plant world she seeks to find answers to the quesions raised by contemporary art in particular. One could remember her past projects: a photographic series on the city’s blooming apple trees, which researched the relationship between urban sprawl and vegetation as coded memory; a collection of plants, black in colour, which seeked to establish a connection between photosynthesis and aesthetics; the meticulous large format meadow fragments, drawn in an actual scale. The artist’s own home is full of seedlings, some of which end up at the countryside in Dzūkija while others become works of art.
For a long time, traditions of working the land have founded our way of living. Recently, as life now happens in the city, this memory has become a certain source of longing. ‘Sodų 4’, a gallery situated near the farmers’ market in the most dense part of the capital city, will host Kisarauskaitė’s large format watercolors depicting potato haulm and other fragments of our soil. The chosen size and scale link her works with a particular meditativeness, found in the process of cultivating the land. The creator, drowning in her urban existence, lays a sheet of paper, which covers half of a room in an apartment building, and turns it into a land fragment. This way she compensates for the yearning to be in real nature, and for a sense of calm that could provide.
The second group of exhibits is made up of old farming utensils, that have lost their practicality or have else become relics of the technological development, – the artist has noticed and revivified them for a second life by fully or partially spray-painting them. In general, one of Aistė Kisarauskaitė’s main goals in this exhibition is to cover her chosen surfaces properly, either painting watercolor within the broad area on a large sheet of paper or using spray-paint to coat the antique utensils. It’s not the first time that such coating process becomes the artist’s main concept. In this exhibition, a perfect layer of nacre signifies success. Isn’t that how Ferraris are made – red meaning its entirety itself? Aesthetics becomes a symbol of what’s inside. The pearly utensils are like hyperbolised decorations that shove us our agrarian identity.

Curator of the exhibition Danas Aleksa

Artist, art critic and curator Aistė Kisarauskaitė graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1992, and has been actively participating in the contemporary art field ever since. From 2003, her essays and short stories have been widely published in the cultural press.
Kisarauskaitė was an active performance artist in the nineties. Her performances – seemingly built on a ‘soft’ framework, such as ‘fairy tales’, ‘little mice’, negligible ‘minutia’ – often gained a certain drastic guise in an uncommitted way, for example, by introducing self-harm on a basis of a ‘fairy tale’, etc. It could be said that the both soft and drastic tactics of Kisarauskaitė’s performances are some of the first cases of the feminist aesthetics in lithuanian performance art.

Find out more:
http://letmefix.lt/Aistė_Kisarauskaitė

Organised by LIAA
Sponsored by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Project space ‘Sodų 4’
Sodų str. 4, Vilnius
www.letmekoo.lt/sodu-4

Opening reception 2018/11/26, 7 pm
Exhibition open 2018/11/27 – 12/09
Wednesday to Sunday 3–7 pm
or by appointment, tel.: +37062728274

Tags: