Eglė Ambrasaitė. Exhibition statement for “Screen Works” by Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė

 

High in viscosity obsidian lava flows produce a natural glass, obsidian, typically black in color. Deriving from the depths since the times of the Old World, obsidian glass was used by ancient peoples to manufacture cutting and piercing tools, weapons, jewelry, surgical scalpels, and ritual items. However, it is thought that it was in the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, namely the pre-Hispanic lands of the Aztecs, that obsidian glass was polished for the first time, revealing its highly reflective surface. In awe, Aztec priests believed that such black mirrors were manifestations of their deity Tezcatlipoca (“The God of Fatality”) and served as portals between worlds, revealing inevitable destinies, answers about the afterlife, and deeper mysteries of the universe. Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė’s dark screen photography offers a contemporary scrying experience. Silkscreen prints are printed directly onto mirrored and tinted glass, mounted on steel tripods or suspended within heavy metal frames; paper prints lie veiled beneath tinted dark glass, enclosed within black passepartouts. Reflective surfaces shift with light and the viewer’s position, transforming attempts at reproduction into self-portraits. Lost gazes, low-res textures, broken pixel surfaces and the audience’s reflections, whisper about the vastly fragmented intimacies out in the open – “a healthy terror of being alive”. Gedvilė’s work, thus, functions as a diary of the present-day condition of post-media, and through her works, primal dark matter finds its way to speak to us again.

On her practise Gedvilė writes:

Publicly accessible cameras streaming continuously: the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier calving into Disko Bay, Greenland; the Yangtze River, where baiji dolphins will never surface again; shipping ports; metro platforms; endangered ecosystems; your local shopping mall. Webcam encounters: bodies trying to “compose” themselves to fit into your screen, intimacy intertwined with distance, disrupted by pixels. A private gesture, a desire, and a planetary emergency are equally compressed, streamed, and negligible.

The project departs from midnight online observations – hours spent inhabiting the continuous time of surveillance streams, dwelling in duration that the infrastructure treats as disposable. I translate screenshots, the remnants of attention, through silkscreen onto glass and paper. The process is slow and manual, the opposite of the fleeting image it originates from.