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).
Ieva Kraule-Kūna and Elīna Vītola, Artist Crisis Center II-B: Fair Gear, 2020
"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 Groševs, Hai!, 2020
"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."
Jānis Dzirnieks, Band Hand, 2020
"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."
Indriķis Ģelzis, Composition without grapes, 2020
"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!"
Elza Sīle, Piss jacuzzi at feeble red star construction, 2020
"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."