Near 555 Nanometers, 2024
Site-specific installation (multi-channel sound, lights, electricity, drawing and sculpture installation)
Venue: Eden: New Address, group exhibition, curated by Evita Goze, Žanete Liekīte, Zane Onckule,
Kim? contemporary art centre, Riga, Hanzas iela 22, Latvia, 2024
Special thanks: Jaakko Pallasvuo, Valsts kultūrkapitāla fonds
Photography: Ansis Starks and Evita Vasiljeva
Video documentation:
https://youtu.be/rgDubKNlNQs?feature=shared
Manufacturers of night-vision devices have experimented with different colours and found that the different shades that make up a monochromatic night vision image are most accurately perceived and distinguished when they are green. Although the night-vision images seen in the film Silence of the Lambs and the computer game Call of Duty might seem a little clunky, the colour green offers the most accurate and user-friendly image possible. In addition, as the human eye is most sensitive to light wavelengths close to 555 nanometres (green), the display can be slightly dimmer, which saves battery power.
For several years, the building at 22 Hanzas Street has stood undisturbed and empty. With the sound of jangling electricity and wavelengths of green light, Vasiljeva awakens the spaces as they are: neglected and decaying. Are we dreaming where we are, or are we where we dreamed? The dirty linoleum floors, the cupboards with missing keys and the Soviet lamps whose wires crackle when you touch them are still in those rooms, just before everything disappears in the name of more beautiful dreams.
The installation includes three sculptures, Bed-Room-Bed (2021), which she began to make when she arrived in Paris at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The bed became her studio. In the mornings, half-awake, Vasiļjeva grasped fragments of the high and low frequencies of dreams, which would drift into the surrounding space as the day began. The dreams were documented directly on the blankets under which the author slept. Over the next few years, the artist and these blankets travelled between Riga, Paris and Marseille. Occupying a thin layer between wakefulness and sleep, and taking advantage of the moment when the filter of logical judgment is turned off for a good reason, the quilts are covered with constellations of illogical dreams. For EDEN, Vasiļjeva presents them in a site-specific installation, where she recreates beds from an empty metal structure and twisted electrical cables. The beds are “plugged” into the wall of the exhibition space, connecting to the wider and invisible (electrical) flow that surrounds us, while electromagnetic microphones around the work amplify the otherwise unheard currents of the space.
Evita Vasiljeva ©