Home Sweet Home
Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari.
The birth of town as a phenomenon was prompted by people merging into groups to create an environment for protection, security, interaction and entertainment. It’s a space where people collectively experience their fears, joys and concerns, a place where humans fight their battles for survival. A modern town, on the other hand, is rooted in ambiguous qualities, embracing also the irrational, instinctive and hideous motifs, metaphorically becoming a place created by collective social emotional experience – a stage of human conscience where the drama of social life is played.
The series of works ‘Home Sweet Home’ depicts private houses and their adjacent territories at night-time in various small towns of Latvia. The captured private houses have consciously been selected as such that cannot boast about being architectural masterpieces or cultural monuments, but through the simplicity of their frames and constructions permit to easily relate these images to the archetypal home structures embedded in collective unconsciousness. Oftentimes, we may also encounter the archetypal depiction of the image of house, which sometimes appears plain, naive and romantic, in children’s drawings, dreams and fairy-tale motifs. One of the subjective aspects for such a representation of home and private territory in my work can be traced back to my dream patterns and childhood drawings where a frequently encountered image is that of a plain private house at night with light shining from one window.
The set of photos ‘Home Sweet Home’ is all about living on the edge of survival, about a town as a space which is consciously organised yet infused with and constituted by a plethora of irrational components. It’s all about striving for warmth which is both, individual and collective, psychological and physical; it’s about symbols and codes that abound in our everyday life, sometimes pushing us to make conscious and unconscious choices.
The series of works ‘Home Sweet Home’ depicts private houses and their adjacent territories at night-time in various small towns of Latvia. The captured private houses have consciously been selected as such that cannot boast about being architectural masterpieces or cultural monuments, but through the simplicity of their frames and constructions permit to easily relate these images to the archetypal home structures embedded in collective unconsciousness. Oftentimes, we may also encounter the archetypal depiction of the image of house, which sometimes appears plain, naive and romantic, in children’s drawings, dreams and fairy-tale motifs. One of the subjective aspects for such a representation of home and private territory in my work can be traced back to my dream patterns and childhood drawings where a frequently encountered image is that of a plain private house at night with light shining from one window.
The set of photos ‘Home Sweet Home’ is all about living on the edge of survival, about a town as a space which is consciously organised yet infused with and constituted by a plethora of irrational components. It’s all about striving for warmth which is both, individual and collective, psychological and physical; it’s about symbols and codes that abound in our everyday life, sometimes pushing us to make conscious and unconscious choices.
2008 - 2016 / All works are archival pigment ink prints on rag paper, 50cm x 50cm (ed 12) & 100cm x 100cm (ed 5)
