RIGA - A new exhibition at Arsenals is almost always worth seeing. The gallery has done more over the last couple of years for contemporary Latvian art than anyone else. Its shows constantly strive to break new artistic ground while trying to involve the public as much as possible in the process.
Its latest exhibition - "Nature. Environment. Man." - is, as its name suggests, an exploration of the complex relationship between people and their everyday living environments. Or as the exhibition's curator, Inese Baranovska, says: "This is art not simply as a decorative element, but as an effective medium for motivating us to see the world around us from a new perspective."
Kristaps Epners' striking life-size installation, "New Generation Model," sets the tone as soon as you enter the gallery. A communal garbage bin, of the sort you commonly see outside apartment blocks, sits on a raised, rotating platform, with a dummy of a homeless man rummaging inside it. It's an all-too-common sight in Riga, but something most people don't think twice about.
Yet what could be more degrading than the spectacle of a half visible person scavenging through a foul heap of garbage for his sustenance? It's not exactly a subtle work, but it powerfully shows how capitalism creates an abundance of waste, both material and human, and how we, in turn, react by perceiving it as an everyday aspect of our surroundings.
Kaspars Goba's wonderful series of photographs, entitled "Marsh Country," focuses on a bizarre place in Latvia called Seda, which is built in the middle of a bog. The pictures are intimate portraits of the town's inhabitants, who seem sequestered both geographically and psychologically in the Soviet-era.
There's also an especially interesting video installation by Ieva Jerohina that uses three screens to simultaneously project images of a tiny house in the countryside. We see the old woman who lives there going about her daily chores, such as peeling potatoes and cooking, on two smaller screens. Meanwhile, the house is shown on a large screen from the same perspective throughout a period of twenty-four hours. The video footage is cut and juggled about to reveal the house in differing nuances of light, yet all the while dwelling on its permanency.
It's a thoughtful work, if not a little idealistic in the way it represents its subject in a straightforward narrative. It doesn't probe its subject by fragmenting it, the way many artists would when using a triptych of screens, but invites us to view the old woman and her life as a harmony of disparate parts.
The work that most impressed me though was that of Evelina Deicmane. "How Much Does Happiness Cost?" is the only painting in the exhibition and it really stands apart. It portrays a couple, presumably in their mid-30s, drinking coffee at a table in a sunlit drenched scene of almost surreal happiness. The aerographic style lends the image a suitably superficial veneer, but it carefully avoids kitsch. The couple's faces are perfectly realized. Only their slightly exaggerated gums disturb the image's perfect geometrical harmony.
This is a timely exhibition that poses many interesting questions not only about the state of the environment, but also the state of contemporary art in Latvia, and how effectively it's adapting to capture these hyper real times.
"Nature. Man. Environment."
Arsenals
1 Torna St., Riga
Until May 16
