Tom Lovelace: Repetition Room
Curated exhibition
Repetition Room is a solo exhibition by London-based artist Tom Lovelace, presenting new performance, photography and film work made in response to the gallery’s architecture and history as a former school. This new collection of work has developed over the last year, with a focus on the site’s history and, in particular, the gymnasium—as a space for community, exercise and well-being. The resulting exhibition takes form through an installation that pivots on photography, with large-scale images displayed on both the walls and the floor.
Lovelace has created a fluid space, presenting experiential encounters which interrupt the often passive viewing traditions that lie within visual culture. Inside Repetition Room, photographs are to be looked at, but also explored with one’s body, through movement and touch. Three live performances have also been developed for the exhibition, where photography and gymnasium histories of collective movement and exercise converge.
Repetition Room is the third collaboration between Lovelace and curator and artist Paulius Petraitis, and the latest iteration of Lovelace’s Living Pictures series which explores photography and performance through immersive and interactive exhibition spaces. Previous Living Pictures installations include the National Gallery (London), Van Gogh House (London), The National Museum of Art (Riga), Sid Motion Gallery (London), Materia Gallery (Rome), Geste (Paris), and Flowers Gallery (London).
Read more:
Touch, Movement and Photograms in Tom Lovelace’s ‘Repetition Room’ | Geistė Kinčinaitytė
Curator: Paulius Petraitis
Performers: Greta Bernotaitė, Viktoras Fedorenko, Saulė Noreikaitė, Ieva Akelaitytė, Alina Pilecka, and Matas Baltrėnas
Graphic design: Therese Vandling
Documentation photographs: Bon Alog, Laurynas Skeisgiela, Gertruda Semasko
Exhibition dates and times: 01–30 July 2022
Performances: 30 June, 14 & 28 July 2022
Location: Atletika gallery, Vitebsko Str. 21, Vilnius
The exhibition is organised by Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association (LIAA).
Activities of LIAA are supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality. Exhibition sponsor: Paterson Zevi.
Measured perspectives
Curated two-person exhibition
Perspective is a long-standing topic of interest for Dutch visual artist Katja Mater and American photographer Erin O’Keefe. It functions both as a playing field for practical experimentation and as a tool to raise questions about the supposedly indexical status of the photographic image. Yet more, perspective reveals itself to be a significantly malleable construct. Mater and O’Keefe employ the optical ambivalence intrinsic to photography to highlight that seemingly fixed viewpoints are carefully composed, rather than fluid and subjective.
Along with the ambivalence of spatial perception, Measured Perspectives also underlines the potential of a process-based approach in the context of today’s increasingly fast-paced and result-oriented work culture. Mater and O’Keefe embrace time consuming work habits that could be described as methodical, deliberate, even slow. Their practice, which stands in contrast to the quick project-based systems propagated by the market economy, restates the value of measured and process-based experimentation.
This is evident in Mater’s film Threefold (2018), which explores the process of making a drawing that repeats itself in 3 versions with a 30-second delay. Difference within repetition is also explored in the diptych series Dear Sides (2019). These double-sided works explicitly play with meaning, specifically its constructability and reversibility: the same image proposes a different interpretation depending on which side one views the work from.
Measured Perspectives also presents new and yet unexhibited works by Erin O’Keefe. Among them is a series of photographs made by the artist in her apartment’s narrow hallway while she was in lockdown. They seem slightly rougher around the edges than O’Keefe’s usual studio pieces, which are also on display in the exhibition. They reveal themselves to lean on a repetitive process and the spatial flattening offered by the camera lens more transparently. As with Mater’s work, it matters that these are photographs, which despite their tricky appearance are remarkably photographic.
Measured Perspectives
Riga Art Space, 2022 04 22 – 06 12
Artists: Katja Mater, Erin O’Keefe
Curator and text author: Paulius Petraitis
Architect: Pauls Rietums
Part of Riga Photography Biennial 2022
Read more:
I See Something You Don’t See | David Ashley Kerr
Documentation: Madara Kuplā
Untaken Photographs
Publication
For about a year, instead of taking certain photographs I wrote them down. The urge was born out of a personal struggle: I felt that my photographic style was changing. I was in a limbo: unable to shoot as I used to, the new style was yet to form.
Untaken Photographs documents a personal struggle, and is a diary of an attempt to deal with a certain creative void. The exercise was therapeutic and helpful accepting the confusing change. The project found form in a zine that is ultimately about seeing, photographic perception and the (limits of) image. It is also an artistic dialogue with the writings of Vilém Flusser.
Numbered edition of 100, 2012
b/w risograph, b/w & color digital print
Texts in English and Japanese
Design by Fred Cave
Published by Booklet Press
Contemporary photography
Publication
Contemporary Photography is a quick and painless anthology of contemporary photography, containing short texts that describe the motifs of then-present day art photography.
In the collections of:
MoMA Library, MACBA, Clark Art Institute, Joan Flasch Collection (SAIC)
Black offset printing
Edition of 500
Published by Lodret Vandret
The work was updated in 2017 with a follow-up edition – Contemporary Contemporary Photography.
The updated edition was an artistic exploration into a changed landscape of cultural vision-making and offers completely new texts that describe the motifs of art photography in 2017. Humorous and with a certain tongue-in-cheek edge, it is an evocative exploration of the contemporary condition of art photography and its making.
Offset white ink on black paper
Edition of 500
Published by Lodret Vandret
New tools in photography: from Google to algorithm
Artistic research & group exhibition
New Tools in Photography: From Google to Algorithm posits that a tool is never merely a passive instrument; it is a carrier of cultural and technological meaning that actively reorganises how we work, see, and structure our understanding of the world. Investigating this premise, the project looks at software and algorithms not as neutral utilities, but as active agents in the production of contemporary visual culture.
Whether through Photoshop, networked platforms like Flickr, or machine vision, specific technologies introduce distinct logics to the medium of photography. The project proposes that these tools do not just facilitate image-making – they fundamentally alter the discourse around it. Presented as both a touring exhibition and a special issue of Fotografija magazine, the project gathers artists who engage with these infrastructures to make visible the mechanisms that shape our seeing.
Participating Artists: Thomas Albdorf, James Bridle, Mantas Grigaitis, Aaron Hegert, Mishka Henner, Esther Hovers, Zach Norman, Erin O’Keefe, Indrė Šerpytytė, Penelope Umbrico.
Essays: Alise Tifentale, Kate Palmer Albers, Ilaria Speri, Roksana Filipowska, Marijana Rayl.
Venues: Nida Art Colony; Vilnius Photography Gallery (2018).
Blog re-blog
200 images, curated by 200 photographers
Reflecting the post-curatorial mode of online image distribution, curators Max Marshall and Paulius Petraitis have each selected and randomly paired two groups of 100 photographers. Each artist then selected an image from the other’s portfolio, to be exhibited in tandem.
The exhibition of projected images was presented at Signal gallery, NY, and Austin Center for Photography.
Press coverage: The Austin Chronicle, Art & Arnold, Quiet Lunch.
This is it/now
Exhibition on Snapchat
This Is It/Now was a photographic exhibition that took place on Snapchat and utilized the ephemeral platform to touch on the issues of changing materiality and temporality of photographic images. It aimed to extend boundaries of exhibiting spaces and reflect on the dynamic definitions of the networked image. The project featured 6 artists over a period of 6 weeks in August-September 2015: Nico Krijno, Roxana Azar, Sergiy Barchuk, Ruth Van Beek, Lonneke van der Palen, David Brandon Geeting.
The project, co-curated with Max Marshall, concluded with a panel discussion in Signal gallery, NY.
Press coverage: Circulation | Exchange, VICE, Dazed Digital, Hyperallergic
Sraunus
Screen-based photography exhibition
Sraunus was a pioneering series of screen-based exhibitions, where each instalment featured a different selection of over forty emerging photographic artists. The curated images reflected emergent trends in post-digital photography. Through a projection-based and event-led format, Sraunus also invited critical discussion about the changing materiality of photography and the place of the digital image in the gallery.
The project ran from 2010 to 2013, and was exhibited in 8 locations: Gedimino 27, Vilnius; Center for Culture, Marijampole; Steinsland Berliner Gallery, Stockholm; BYOB Vancouver; Nofound Photofair, Paris; Awa Gallery, Amsterdam; Nextart Gallery, Gothenburg; Diffusion Festival, Cardiff.
Pinigų uostas / Money haven
Interactive installation
Pinigu uostas / Money Haven was a performative simulation of an offshore company. It investigated the rhetoric of international tax evasion and raised the question what mechanisms legitimize and normalise these practices. The project directly appropriated infamous companies offering such services (such us “Mossack Fonseca” and “The Nomad Capitalist”). The imitated elements of their rhetoric and aesthetics reflect the familiar logic of contemporary business thinking, in which a lack of expertise is masked via overconfidence and a standard design, pursuing an illusion of legitimacy.
In the performative installation, which balances between absurdity and seriousness, Money Haven aims to explore how the corporate practice of tax evasion affects the decline of a collective wellbeing on the state level. These tensions are more extensively discussed in the project’s magazine Post-Colonial Times.
Part of Dignity JCDecaux prize show, curated by Monika Kalinauskaitė and Adomas Narkevičius, at CAC Vilnius 2018 11 30 – 2019 01 13.
Pinigu Uostas / Money Haven: Ieva Sriebaliūtė, Mindaugas Gavrilovas, Paulius Petraitis
Entrepreneur performance: Andrej Polukord
Arrow spinning: Linas Čekanavičius
Photos: Inga Jankūnaitė, Daina Eičaitė, JCDecaux
