7 pm 6th of April in the gallery „si:said“ (Daržų str. 18, Klaipėda) opens a solo exhibition “Parallel File-Cabinet (Fragment)” by Egle Ulcickaite.

In my creative practice, I investigate the themes of time, memory, and multiplicity of reality. Painting for me is a way to analyse the states of mind caused by encounters with material references to the past discovered in the present. I am trying to understand where the paradoxical impression of temporality and recurrence at the same time comes from – an impression not in terms of impressionism, but an imprint, a trace in the internal flow of time.

The multi-layered semantic structure of my painted motifs leads to a series of questions. I am trying to find the answers to them by painting. More precisely, the objects that I paint start asking questions themselves. The most frequent question is: ‘Who am I?’

A file cabinet is a systematized set of cards holding certain information. In my project, these cards are replaced with paintings in a sense. I treat them as a kind of link repositories. One might say that I am putting together a collection of painted artefacts. But this is driven not only by aesthetic interest. Rather, I want to find out why there is a need to collect other people’s possessions from the past, why our gaze involuntarily turns back to it, and most importantly – what kind of gaze it is.

At the same time, the Lithuanian word for a file cabinet (kartoteka) also evokes the word ‘to repeat’ (kartoti). Certain shapes and impressions recur in my works. However, the paintings themselves do not refer to a particular period in the past (while their iconography perhaps does) and instead act as mediators of experience and a medium that triggers interpretation parallels.

Eglė Ulčickaitė (b. 1989) currently lives and works in Vilnius. In 2013 she graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts with an MA degree in painting. In 2010 Eglė studied at Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands.Since 2013 she is a PhD student in Fine Arts at VAA. Eglė has been actively participating in exhibitions since 2010. Since 2014 she has been working as a lecturer at the Painting Department (VAA).

The exhibition runs until 29th of April.