Theory of R (or eight years long story about how I failed as an artist, photographer & person)
It is weird, following eight years, to come to a realization that actually you have not been doing what you thought you were doing, but something else entirely. When I began shooting the photos for the Theory of R series, I was convinced that these works are about the aftertaste of the global economic crisis in Riga/Latvia. Yet, when reviewing the works about eight years later, I noticed the many contradictions that do not permit to consider them a true documentary commentary on the post-crisis socioeconomic negations in Latvia. Much too late I realized that these photos have simply emerged as products of a self-therapeutic photographic practice, a kind of psychological coping mechanism with an unsuccessful pregnancy. This awareness is both a path to greater internal peace and a liberating experience for me as an artist, to free myself from any previously hatched plans of discovering something documentary or socioeconomically true about Riga. Nevertheless, the works of this series still present an attempt to construct a private and situative theory of Riga that also gives a mouthful of the aftertaste of the economic crisis in Latvia.
So, what’s left after all documentary and conceptual attempts to tell the story about Riga? Works with lost gloves are only honest part of these work series. Gloves which have lost by strangers and found by strangers. These lost gloves are signs of pure kindness by stranger to stranger.
Works dedicated to L.
2011 - 2019 / All works are archival pigment ink prints on rag paper. Sizes variable.
