Theory of R (or eight-year-long story about how I failed as an artist, photographer, and person)
It feels strange, after eight years, to realise that you have not been doing what you thought you were doing, but rather something entirely different. When I began shooting the photos for the Theory of R series, I was convinced that these works addressed the aftertaste of the global economic crisis in Riga, Latvia. However, upon reviewing the works about eight years later, I noticed many contradictions that prevent them from being considered a true documentary commentary on the post-crisis socioeconomic narratives in Latvia. Only much later did I realise that these photos simply emerged as products of a self-therapeutic photographic practice, serving as a psychological coping mechanism for an unsuccessful pregnancy. This awareness is both a pathway to greater internal peace and a liberating experience for me as an artist, freeing me from any previously conceived plans of discovering something documentary or socioeconomically accurate about Riga. Nevertheless, the works in this series still attempt to construct a private and situational theory of Riga that also conveys the lingering impact of the economic crisis in Latvia.
So, what’s left after all the documentary and conceptual attempts to tell the story of Riga? Works with lost gloves are merely an honest part of this work series. Gloves that have been lost by strangers and found by strangers. These lost gloves are signs of pure kindness from one stranger to another.
Works dedicated to L.
2011 - 2019 / All works are archival pigment ink prints on rag paper. Sizes variable.
