Roger Palmer / Paulina Eglė Pukytė: ARTScape: United Kingdom

ROGER PALMER

PAULINA EGLĖ PUKYTĖ

DISLOCATED

22 July – 7 August, 2009

Gallery Vartai presents a British artist Roger Palmer and a London based Lithuanian artist Paulina Eglė Pukytė.

Using photography, wall drawing and video, Roger Palmer proposes links between different places in the world. His works might be considered therefore as emblems of colonisation and migration. The nine exhibited silver gelatine photographs each originate from a different country: Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Jamaica, Malaysia, Namibia, Panama, South Korea and the United States. These pictures are titled only with local place names, but they reveal very little about their places of origin. Instead, they repeatedly bring the viewer back to the analogue photographic surface and its capacity to present momentary qualities of space, light and atmosphere that reference painting and drawing. Palmer‘s photography becomes the unifing agent of all medias he uses in his shows, where he encapsulates several elements that define his ouvre: the element of chance, the sensation and power of the sea, and the act of capturing the moment, which transcends beyond the frames of his photographs.

Paulina Eglė Pukytė tells „true stories“ with video, photography, text and found artefacts. The artist records seemingly unimportant situations of everyday life, takes them out of context and encodes them with fabled meaning. Thus in video pieces Satyr and Scylla she gives names of mythical creatures to two as if accidentally observed ordinary people who then “do not live up to expectations”. As myth and reality collide, these situations acquire the dimension of irony and social critique, while accustomed truths turn upside down. Similarly, the “peoples design”, the sweet girlish handiwork of amateur posters collected from London brothels and shown here, differs significantly in its form from the business it advertises. Playing with meaning PE Pukytė’s work reveals discrepancies between belief, appearance and reality.