The Rooster Gallery invites you to a solo show GREEN NIGHT, SLEEP TIGHT by Alina Melnikova.
In her newest works, A. Melnikova explores the relation between nature/naturality and artificiality and its sociocultural reflections. Her paintings, drawings and ceramic objects created in the recent years show a shift of the artist’s focus from gender identity to the categories of post-humanism and post-identity, transcending the limits of the anthropocentric perspective and testifying to a change in the taxonomic approach and the deconstruction of the hierarchic classification of life forms. Though the artist refers to the insights of scientific research (Donna Haraway, Lynn Margulis), her creative approach is intuitive and leaves some space for indeterminacy, doubts, confusion, and paradoxes. Using different media and adding ecological and cultural dimensions to a culturally engaged look, the artist creates visually and semantically multi-layered artefacts. In the exhibition, bizarre and familiar, threatening and enticing, cruel and soft shapes of various worlds thrive, forming symbiotic, mirroring and echoing systems, and engendering the dynamics between the urbanized and natural environment, between the ancient knowledge based on beliefs and magic and presentiments of the future. A modified formula of wishing good night in the exhibition title points not only to the dominant colour of the works, but also to the state of a sweet but toxic dream, a kind of intermediary state between controlled artificiality and unrestricted naturality. As the boundaries between the two poles are blurred, a wide territory of post-pleasure possibilities opens – something like a landscape of (still un)explored visual and sensual experiences.
when the indeterminate absorbs , when the magical beyond wraps around …
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“Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an affirmation, a celebration of the plentitude of nothingness.”*
Drifting in, drifting around…these sly objects and materials are beyond what they seem. To seem is so literal, to be (felt) is so poetical…*lush laughter*, at our petty assessments of them. These corals are cosmic. They are the beyond, the unknowable forests, the unthinkable contortions and configurations that are performed by the overlooked and the unassuming. Their colours mutate, their fingers transform over time, they are subject to —as all things are— a uniting potentiality; to become is the mother we all share. These feral, fertile creatures and characters are pieces of an overwhelming nexus of possibility, affect, sentience and transience: they will be what they weren’t, they affect and are affected, they feel and receive, and they are in constant motion forwards, never ceasing to advance.
Again, this is what we have in common: all of us bushy bouquets, evolving exceptions, funky anomalies that change-forward and feel. This seeming (again, seeming is so literal) fantasy world proposed by Alina Melnikova isn’t so much a “fantasy” world (understood traditionally) at all, but a translation/tranportation of dynamics between the urban and rural, the fierce and the soft, the odd and the familiar…a stunning magical realist’s perspective on the diversity of our world and its symbiotic, mirroring, echoing systems. We need each other, we need the friction. Magic here is not an esoteric phenomenon, but an ancient folklore describing transformative, causal, dialectical and frictional systems that change and are changed, feel and are felt; a reciprocal, concatenating web of looping causality (I cause , you cause , we cause together …). We see this reflective system in this exhibition. Haven’t you seen or felt something that looks like this work? A tree? A branch? A necklace? A figure? A fold? A bend? A towards? An inside? A beyond?
Magic is fusion, friction, a becoming-something we weren’t because of something else. What happens to domestic plants featured in an urban party? Maybe the plants take on a new dimension under the neon lights. What happens to the characters who see them? Maybe they go home and decide to paint and sculpt…and the web goes on. These exchange dynamics are fundamental to symbiosis and affectivity: what happens because of something else happening. So again, this exhibition is no fantasy but a shimmering reality that coexists with(in) our own. A fecund feel-space that really exists in every way possible. This differs from the Western landscape tradition that dominated visual culture from the 15th-20th Century: Alina is not generating a portal —a representation of…to—, but a magical actuality that exists within the frictional happenstances between the diverse array of things that exist: squirrels, violins, sand, hooves, sidewalks, street lights, adornments, milk, rain, vessels, nothingness.—(these greens never looked so foreign , didn’t they ?)—Indeterminate, ambiguous creatures ferment between and beyond the many corners of existence.
This is where ambiguity and mystery and magic enter the spiritual realm…where fantasy isn’t imagined, but redefined. Which is more a tree? The thing with leaves and bark, or Alina’s magical translation/transportation of a tree? If we redefine generously what fantasy is, neither is more or less real. Breaking down reductionist semiotics is difficult, but through dreaming, through magic we can get there. Playing is magic, touching is magic, creating is magic, dialoguing is magic, carrying is magic, collaboration is magic, familiarity (the you in me , the me in us) is magic, indeterminacy (the beautiful, empty unknown) is magic. Pull…push…reach
*Karen Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” in Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, ed. Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018), 1-2, 6, 10
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Alina Melnikova (b. 1983) is an artist currently based in Barcelona (Spain). She graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with an MA in painting in 2008. In 2004, while still studying, she got actively involved in the Lithuanian art scene and held solo exhibitions in Lithuania, Austria, Spain, and took part in group exhibitions in Lithuania, Spain, Finland, Poland, Estonia and Austria. She is the winner of the 3rd place of the Young Painter Prize competition (2009), and a recipient of the scholarship of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and the Sleipnir scholarship of the Nordic Council of Ministers.
Curator: Gabriel Virgilio Luciani
Design: Fabrizio Contarino
Text: Justina Augustytė, Gabriel Virgilio Luciani
Translation: Aušra Simanavičiūtė
Event is kindly supported by LATGA Association, Vilnius City Municipality and Topcolor.
November 25 – December 12. ŠV. BRUNONO BONIFACO G. 12
Opening hours of the gallery: IV-VI 16.00–19.00, VII 14.00–17.00
