A gift for Benjamin Clementine.
Awaken from books – represents eight famous creators, national awakers, writers and scientists who lived and worked in Lithuania in the late 19th and early 20th century. The poet Bernardas Brazdžionis, social figure and publicist Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė, linguist Jonas Jablonskis, semioticist and linguist Algirdas Julius Greimas, scientist, archaeologist Marija Gimbutienė, philosopher Stasys Šalkauskis, writer, philosopher Vydūnas, prose writer, playwright Žemaitė - look at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library‘s of Lithuania visitors.
The 71 square meters installation is like a bridge between history and the present. Books revive by living history, and in the way like this, makes sense of space.
In 2018, my homeland Lithuania commemorated its centennial as a Republic. Searching for a conceptual medium for my work dedicated to this occasion, I discovered soil as a means of drawing. Soil is simple and archaic, yet it can be rediscovered as a creative medium. Here I am drawing portraits of the statesmen who signed Lithuania's declaration of independence in 1918. They were used in a live installation and as portraits for the press.
Installation Life Land is from soil - a simple and archaic material, a symbol of life. During WW2 Japanese consul in Lithuania Chiune Sugihara gifted lives for thousands of Jews by issuing them transit visas to Japan, thus granting survivors a second life. A mix of Lithuanian and Japanese soil is a creative medium for Sugihara’s portrait - an act of gratitude for all Japanese. For survirors it was Life land - the only way to be safe.
Installation was exhibited at Broadbean gallery in Tokyo on Oct. 2018.
Hundreds of furniture and accessories, an area of 100 square meters, this is another perspective installation that hides nothing but the self-portrait of Jolita Vaitkute. Using interior details from the various salons in the Domus Gallery helps to reveal the character of the artist. The process took sixty hours, during which was walked about 84 kilometers.
I made a portrait of the accordionist Martynas Levickis from real accordions and their parts.
An accordion has about twenty thousands parts inside, so I decided to create the portrait from them. We disassembled two old accordions into the smallest possible parts.
It was a nice way to give new life to old instruments in an art project. It took about four hours.
Client: accoAkademija
Imagine that it's enough to have a single look at someone’s broken phone and their life story pops up in front of your eyes. What if it will be yours?
We touch the screens much more often than the bodies of our loved ones. We see the World and feel intimacy through the glass. We are so lonely with our phones, and even much more lonely and insecure without them. Broken screens are like the last moments of the lives of our beloved ones. Appreciate it – with a single glance you can make it precious.
Accordion installations for accordion week in Vilnius
Client: accoAkademija
Advertising for Narvesen with McCann Vilnius agency.
The slogan says "French to the last crumb!"
Sometimes when Emilija Vinzanovaite and I get tired of art installations, we make tasty and giant food art, which which is meant to be eaten! The first one is a four meter long perspective artwork (meaning you can see it only from one angle) with Einstein’s face. We worked for five hours on this one. It was made from different desserts such as cannelés, chocolate, muffins, strawberries, grapes, macaroons… And we had to control ourselves not to eat while working.
The second one is the Lithuanian painter and composer M.K. Ciurlionis. We made his portrait from chocolate desserts such as muffins, cakes, cookies, doughnuts and some berries. It’s a bit smaller than Einstein and took us a few hours. We used the same technique – you can see the face only from one angle, but nevertheless you can eat it from all sides.
A perspective composition of fruits hanging in the air. Today, honeybees are faced with many hostile factors threatening the survival of these honey-producing insects. For example, various pests such as varroa mites, pathogens, chemicals, pesticides and the loss of their natural habitats. All of these factors have been leading to mass bee fatality and so-called "colony collapse disorder". Bees are responsible for the pollination of one third of all plants used for human consumption. The fruits that were used for this installation are just a small fraction of the diverse foods that humanity would lose if bees ceased to exist.
“Untranslatable Words” is a project illustrating words from several languages which are impossible to translate. Initiator of the project was European Commission’s representation in Lithuania.
Gökotta (Swedish): To wake up early in the morning with the purpose of going outside to hear the first birds sing.
Sobremesa is a Spanish word that refers to the time spent after lunch or dinner socializing with the people you shared the meal with. Meals are a very important part of Spanish culture, and the Spaniards value the time spent relaxing and chatting after they finishing eating. The Catalan equivalent is sobretaula.
Litost (Czech). Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, remarked that, “As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.” The closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden realization of one’s own misery.
Pålegg (Norwegian): Anything and everything you can put on a slice of bread.
Verschlimmbessern (German): To accidentally make something worse in the process of attempting to mend or improve it. Multiple applications regarding computers, cake baking and relationships.
Gattara (Italian): This untranslatable word describes a woman, often old and lonely, who devotes herself to stray cats. The Simpsons have this character too, known as the Crazy Cat Lady.
Házisárkány (Hungarian): This untranslatable word would be literally translated as “home-dragon”. The derogatory term actually designates an impatient or ill-natured spouse.
A project to raise public awareness of recycling. The participants retained their garbage for several weeks, and then had their portraits created from their waste. The project was initiated by Zalias taskas (“Green dot”).
A visual installation for a fair organised by the stationery company OfficeDay created from about a thousand pencils – a perspective portrait of Albert Einstein, chosen as an icon of creativity. The project took about 11 hours to complete.
A perspective installation for a campaign by the Lithuanian Youth Council (LiJOT) encouraging young people to vote. The work portrays Jonas Basanavicius [j ɒn a s b ʌs ʌn ʌv ɪt ʃuːs], a founding father of the Lithuanian Republic in 1918, and is composed of many notes on which a number of prominent Lithuanians wrote down their thoughts as to why they vote.
For the opening of a new bread factory, I was asked to create an installation from bread. After a few months of brainstorming I decided to do something new – a gigantic toast installation. The idea was to render a view of the city of Vilnius. That was the easiest part. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize ahead of time how difficult this would actually be (insert many days for drying bread and counting every slice).
Our toast installation ended up being about 3.5×2.5 m and we used 1064 pieces of toast to create it. We worked in a team for about 50 hours. And it happened, we set a Lithuanian record for the largest piece of artwork made from toast.
And if that’s not enough trouble, we had a few accidents while transporting our beauty and I had to recreate it three times...
