Sardines at the Garage Gallery in Prague

14.03.2023

Photo report

Group exhibition ‘Sardines’ curated by Kaspars Groševs is on view at Garage gallery in Prague untill April 20.

Participating artists: Atis Izands, Jake Kent, Anna Malicka, Dzelde Mierkalne, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Sofie Tobiášová, Amanda Ziemele.

“Their shadows are long and scrawly, they breathe the vape fumes of the city while observing its streams of earnest experiences even if spent on the giddiness of life itself. Brewing as a foamy beer the sight reveals the timelines of surfaces as they echo through this very moment while entangling imprints of materials’ memory - for some the time is limitless, for others it’s crawling on you as we speak. As I try to remember at least a few love songs, all I think of is the color ‘orange’. My professor in Riga has an orange hard drive, orange coffee maker, orange speakers, and god knows what else orange. You can still bump into him on the rhombic streets of Riga (or anywhere really - as he occasionally appears to see familiar faces around the world), definitely around 8:00 AM, going to or from his duties as an art worker. It’s hard to pin down what it implies, maybe movement (not just spatial). Sometimes the movement resonates - leaving perfect circles just like fish. The talking compostable coffee cup lid reminded me of Manhattan and how fish has become a rather luxurious and rare meal. People keep talking about the best fish they’ve ever had, but it rarely comes around. “I know this great Italian place…”, I nod and smile as I think of nothing and everything. Sometimes when there’s a certain nothingness in artworks on the walls and floors, the fish price goes up. “We’ve run out of red snapper, unfortunately”, I nod and smile and think of smoked Baltic herring (Clupea harengus membras from the rich Clupeidae fish family of the vast world sea waters (with a few exceptions)). I try to trick my own algorithms into leading them astray, into the wilderness, or at the shore (because they can’t swim). I blind them with moonshine at sunrise and a few months later end up with a thread of conclusions. “Meet other artists more often,” I scribble down as if I just had a stroke. There is a recipe for everything, even peeled apples (it’s so simple it’s difficult to grasp it). The meta-bots are constantly trying to bring certain art recipes to our attention, spreading across the disciplines of DIY spray paint art, sleazy hotel art, crafty-wow-did-you-make-it-yourself art, accidental art, folk art, true art, successful art, and so on. * Siri, play: 4hero feat. Ursula Rucker - The Awakening * If you say it loud, it might come true. Just like 2007 came true, and the next year was even wilder, and so on. As we chew our cultural webs through channels (both sincere and dark) the wobbly tower grows taller. “I think God is moving its tongue / There's no crowds in the street and no sun,” I hum and try to move quickly yet with a salty pinch of grace. “Art is everything that’s happening,” I remember my professor again (“No shame left”). He has this giant block of Parmigiano in the fridge in case someone comes for a visit. In the smokey, toasty backroom of 427 I greet people with some horse juice - it’s always the season! Sometimes the bay freezes over, sometimes the wind pierces ears, sometimes there’s no escape from artist’s studio, sometimes there’s a flash moment of sticks and bones running through transitions of night, glitter and light as tools become extensions of body. Forget about the sardines, those are the beautiful moments that can only be remembered as objects of textures, rhythms, patterns, or lack of regularity, movements both swift and enlarged in time’s scale, multi-layered landscapes of gestures… And yet you still feel the taste of salt.”