At what point in my life and artistic career can I begin to call myself an artist? If I become an artist, can I ever lose that status? Once Upon an Artist is the whole of the Master’s thesis exploring issues in self-identifying as an artist, and proposes the idea that the correct vocabulary and context (in this case – academic) is all that is required to call oneself an artist. The work consists of:
Capsule
Millenial Daybed
miss you and think you’re great
Artificial Artist (thesis)
y i
December 2020
Steel
Creating work to overcome fear of making. Physical embodiment of the question that keeps me from making art – ‘y i’ – “Why am I the correct person to tell this story, to ask this question? Why should it be me that makes this work?”
Autotherapeutic Practices through
Individual Improvised Video
Interviews with Oneself,
a step-by-step guide.
Text instructions.
The work was a sort of therapy where I filmed what I called ‘interviews’ with myself – forcing myself to talk about my fears, anxieties, wishes, and whatever else as an
artist. The work was never completed as a video-work, however. Rather than allowing the work to slowly develop, in hopes of getting accepted to the JCDecaux Premija exhibition I tried to force it into a form that I didn’t believe in. In the end, this just made me abandon the video project, and instead I simply provide instructions I followed to create the work.
A one work exhibition
Nida Art Colony, Spring 2021
How does an artist create and exhibit work during the pandemic?
The work shown – an environmental installation –
a large piece of driftwood (still damp from the sea, covered in sand) and a laptop playing a
recorded video of the iced-over sea just a few days before
The work brought the sea – the smell of the soaked driftwood, the grit of the sand, the
feel of the smooth wood, the sound and sight of the waves crashing – into my working space.
Even in this state of double isolation, it allowed me to be in two places – to relax by the sea
while working in the room.
Echo
2090, Lokomotif Meeting Room, Fall 2019
Sound installation created for the show entitled “Echo”. Audio recorded at entrace to the meeting room is then delayed by 71 seconds, and played back in the stairwell at the entrance of the building. The noise feeds on itself, echoes, picks up the background noise of the trains – echoing the city’s needs for a tunnel under the train tracks that were only looked at once the Rail Baltic project was confirmed to need to go through the town.
The Modern Prometheus
Vilnius, Autarkia, Fall 2019
Pig’s hearts, Calf’s eye, led, formalin, isopropyl alcohol, battery, glass jars, knife
An organic sculpture exploring the relationship between man and technology. Developed as part of course-work at the Vilnius Academy of Arts for the Contemporary Sculpture Master’s programme.
Vandenys
Vilnius, Liepkalnis Water Reservoir 2018
Audiovisual performance “Vandenys” (Waters)
Composer: Juta Pranulytė
Projection Design: Lukas V. Dagilis
Light design: Arvydas Buinauskas
Performed: “Liepaitės”
Space: Vilniaus Vandenys
Home(less)
Glasgow, Reid Building of GSA, June 2017
Leap Motion, Projector, Multi-channel audio interface, six speakers, Macbook
Home(less) is the first part of a comprehensive series of installations exploring how interactive technologies can be used within traditional mediums. What had initially started as a project meant for music soon turned into a project about my own life, exploring my identity and concept of home through interactive story-telling. Using the Leap Motion controller for hand detection, viewers are invited to engage in an intimate experience where their placing a hand in the sensor’s range triggers a narration of a story to begin playing. The movement of the viewer’s hands begins to reveal images that accompany each story, and moves the audio in quadphonic space, adding depth to traditional storytelling.
EgyVienasOne – Bėgiai
Glasgow, The Art School, October 2015
An exhibition devised as a response to disregard of our course, and new media art in
general, within our university.
Premiere of new work: Bėgiai, an interactive installation meant to bring to attention the history of deportation and exile in Lithuania.
A poem roughly outlining the unfolding of exile of Lithuanian hangs to the left of the work. A
TV laid flat shows names of people exiled from a region in Lithuania, one at a time. To the right, a CRT TV shows own videos recorded on and around trains in Lithuania. The video reacts to the ambient noise levels in the space – to move forwards, the viewers must remain silent in respect to those who were exiled.
The noisier the space gets, the slower the video gets, until it begins reversing.
Without respecting the past, one cannot move forward.
Living Walls
Glasgow, 2015
Visualizing long-lasting effects of our influence to a space, through interventions in the Barnes Building.
In what used to be a children’s hospital, and is now an art school, skeletal structures projected throughout the building react to the ambient
sounds in the spaces.
To bring attention to how little people think about the spaces they inhabit daily, the sound of people moving through the spaces is enough to cause major change in the visuals, often starting audio feedback that shows how innocuous actions can sometimes have long lasting effects.
GSA Fashion Show Projections
The Art School, Glasgow, 2017
Projection Design for the 70th anniversarry of the GSA Fashion Show. Designed alongside Shaun Murphy’s wonderful lighting design, the projections fill the space with action during down-time, carry the mood and energy between collections and highlight certain collections with special transitions.
New Dreams
The Art School, Glasgow, 2017
The Dream On project was a collaboration between four major Scottish institutions:
Glasgow School of Art, University of Glasgow, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the BBC Scottish Symphonic Orchestra.
Directed by Graham McLaren, students created an hour-long performance inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The event was live broadcast on the BBC, as part of the first day for the Shakespeare 400 programme.
While not the main focus of the show, the projections added additional depth to the event, helping it stand out even more. The main goal of the projections was providing additional perspectives and accessibility (parts of the event were performed by the Performance in British Sign Language and English students. Audience members of all levels of hearings benefited at some point of the performance from the projections as a tool for accessibility) through a mix of live visuals, audio-visualization, on-stage
cameras, 3D cameras, and pre-rendered assets.
Saxophone Quartet No. 1
Druskomanija Festival, Druskininkai/Vilnius 2016
Visualisations for Katarsis4 saxophone quartet performance for the Druskomanija contemporary music festival. Shown both in Druskininkai and Vilnius (Kultūros Baras Kablys) in 2016.