VIP Ambassador, Vita Liberte’s Riga Spotlight
Artist Crisis Center is an ongoing duo project of Ieva Kraule-Kūna and Elīna Vītola. This video features highlights from the second edition “Artist Crisis Center II: Tact Gear,” which is on view at Pakt (Amsterdam) through a collaboration with Low (Riga) and “Artist Crisis Center II-B: Fair Gear,” which is on view at Kim? (Riga).
"A work by Elina and Ieva is a continuation of a wonderful project called Artists Crisis Center initiated in 2019, providing a shelter to unwanted and failed artworks of their colleagues. This work comes in a form of the backpack that you can take along your road through the pandemic, as it includes a portable table, a sketchbook, a paintbrush, a waterproof coat, a temporary housing solution, and some contemporary art!"
"Kaspars is a man about Riga arts scene. A creator of first artists' run spaces, a curator of multitude of shows, he is also an accomplished artist himself. His characters are a synthesis of abstract imagination and real-life creatures. In this work, we see a subject walking down a rainy Riga street."
"Janis lives between Riga and Amsterdam, and his works appeal with their creation technique. First, screenshots are taken with pop-up advertisements or banners from websites. Secondly, the obtained images are violently deformed by stretching and minimizing them multiple times with the Content-Aware Scale tool of the Photoshop photo editing software. And finally, the images are printed on insulation material - extruded polystyrene foam, and the surface obtains its shine thanks to epoxy resin coating."
"My favorite work. Indrikis' wall-based sculptures reference minimalist abstraction, and ideas of recognizable patterns of a dystopian world. At an initial glance, the works constructed from stainless steel with wood veneer and fabric could be seen as painterly sculptures. Up close, a complex pattern of interwoven steel and reinforcement bars intersect each other, as if fused by the trail of a pencil dragged through the air. Visit the gallery to see a brand new work by Indrikis, fresh out of his studio!"
"Collectors are all hyped up on Elza’s work. In her work, oil paint, cut-outs from encyclopedias, graphite or glue represent a standing figure or building blocks of a utopian world of memories. Her art does not possess a clearly evident linear structure, rather consisting of thought processes within time."