Alnis STAKLE. “Mellow Apocalypse”
6-27 October
Art gallery “The White Horse”,
9 Nikolaja Street
Exhibition of the photographer Alnis Stakle will be opened at Art Gallery “The White Horse”.
Exibition of Alnis Stakle “Mellow Apocalypse” at Art Gallery “The White Horse” (Nikolaja Street 9) will be open from 6th to 27th October. The exhibition will display digitally created collages, created from freely accessible materials from art museums’ collections, scientific institutions, and image banks. The opening will be on October 6th at 3p.m., free entrance.
We live in an ocularcentric culture, where the constellations of historical and modern images are more important than the reality. As the reality is a collection of incomprehensible number of images. Images are the basis for transmission of the knowledge, collective memory, entertainment, cultural investigation and they provide limitless chances to return to same events, people, and objects in order to reveal new interpretations. The world of images becomes ever more saturated, and our capacity to grasp and comprehend it is becoming more and more limited. Poetically speaking, the map has grown larger than the territory.
Nowadays we can access almost the entire visual culture that humanity has amassed. In this day and age, when each and every one of us has become a producer and storyteller who strives to express and draw attention to oneself, publicly wallow in melancholy in the social media, to earn money, practise civil journalism etc., the accessibility of the world of images is no longer a privilege, but a self-evident tradition.
I am interested in the fate of the canonized artistic, scientific and journalistic images and their potential to embody contemporary meanings. The collages are grounded in my search for syntactic visual language connections in the images pertaining to various periods, media and domains of the visual culture. I have used images from open source collections of museums, scientific institutions and image banks whose archives may be considered iconic testimonies of the present and the past. The collages make use of the ideas and technical codes established in the visual communication that transcend the borderlines of ages, media and cultures. The codes that are so deeply engrained in culture that they are used without thinking and are understood through pre-existing schemas in the recipients’ minds. Although the decoding of images depends on the recipients’ interests, values, convictions and wishes, yet the globalized world of the visual culture is oversaturated with simulacra where the feminine and the masculine, the other, the desirable, the repulsive and the beautiful is depicted through the use of similar ideas and technical codes in different epochs and various media.
The technical execution of the collages is based in the image post-processing software algorithms, letting them overtake the accuracy and precision of image depiction. Thus, the digital post-processing technological features become a part of the collages’ notional and technical code,” says the artist.
Alnis Stakle (1975, Latvia) is Latvian photographer and the Professor of photography at the Rigas Stradins University (LV). He holds PhD in art education from Daugavpils University (LV). Working both documentary and conceptually his works disclose how sociopolitical ideas can be examined through both fact and fiction as well as the interplay of collective and subjective experience. Ideas of autoethnography and psychogeography are an essential part of his art-based research approach in art. Since 1998, his works has been exhibited widely, including solo & group exhibitions at the Latvian Museum of Photography, Latvian National Museum of Art, Modern Art Oxford (GB), Art Center ‘Winzavod’ in Moscow (RU), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires (AR), Centre for Fine Arts BOZAR in Brussells (BE) as well in private and public collections. His works has been published in British Journal of Photography, GUP, Wired, Camera Austria, Membrana, Gente di Fotografia, EYEMAZING, IMAGO, OVER, OjodePez, Archivo, Leica Fotografie International, ect.
Free entrance.
XII Music and Art Festival Daugavpils ReStArt 2023 is organized by:
Daugavpils state city municipality establishment “Vienibas Nams”, Daugavpils Culture Support Association, Stanislavs Broks Daugavpils Music Secondary School, Daugavpils Culture Castle. Supported by Daugavpils state city municipality.
The events of IX Music and Art Festival “Daugavpils ReStArt 2020” are photographed and filmed for the publicity and historical needs of Cultural Department.
Information: www.daugavpilsrestart.lv, www.vnfestivals.lv, www.vienibasnams.lv, www.daugavpils.lv
