Juozas Laivys. Nothing New
27 May – 2 October 2022
The exhibition features 14 diagrams generated based on the drawings of the reconstruction project of the Pranas Domšaitis Gallery building in Klaipėda (Liepų str. 33). The images are based on the units of measure existing in the building and verifiable in reality, which form color connections and proportions. The aestheticized data are composed in unison with the environment. The interior and exterior of the building intertwine with the inner courtyard and the cityscape beyond. The combination of different perspectives creates an authentic atmosphere, which is complemented by photographs as references to the effects of the artistic research.
In the words of Juozas Laivys, since this exhibition manipulates architectural parameters, one can see its appearance in a specific space as an artistic expression characteristic of a unique building. The environment, which is painted with algorithmic design solutions, the concept of curation and non-curation, and the tasks of artistic post-projection, functions as an exhibition that reveals itself through self-reflection into a self-consciousness that generates nothing new. The visual solutions do not conflict with monument conservation requirements or existing artistic norms and therefore act as an orientation towards the present of being as an abstraction of reality.
The presented works have been extracted by spectral analysis and produced according to the laboratory findings of an artistic energy audit. They are enriched with a simple and down-to-earth objective: to improve the atmospherically relevant characteristics that allow for the alteration of the internally engineered networks of cultural self-awareness.
Building category: finish of particular importance
The artistic practice of Juozas Laivys (b. 1976) includes sculpture, objects, installations, performance art, writing, video, and photography. The artist stands out with his authentic approach to themes that are widely discussed in contemporary art, such as authorship, institutional power, the economic value of art, and the boundary (or lack thereof) between life and art. In raising these issues, he often uses the strategy of appropriation, deliberately straightforward rhetoric – characteristic of mass (as well as bureaucratic) culture – and combines conceptual gestures with physical ones. In 2007, Laivys moved from Vilnius to the village of Narvaišiai in Plungė district, where he has taken on the role of an independent farmer, an urban painter, and an active contemporary artist.
Collaboration remained the basis of his later work, which Laivys produced with local communities and his artist colleagues. In 2015 after creation of 256 artworks, Laivys decided to pause his individual creative work for fourteen years with the aim of turning his own life into a work of art. Presently he engages in an array of post-creative possibilities and explores the realm of pure ideas stemming from current events and artistic vision.
While in this creative suspension, the artist occasionally collaborates with other artists transferring them his creative identity. In the meantime he tends to the Artworks Cemetery. This Cemetery functions as a service for artists and is the only medium of its kind in the whole world.
Laivys graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a degree in sculpture in 2001 and completed a post-doc at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon in France in 2005. In 2021 Laivys recieved PhD in Art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.
Exhibition coordinator Skaistė Marčienė
33 Liepu st, LT-92145, Klaipėda, Lithuania
++370 46 410 412
domsaicio.galerija@lndm.lt
