Currently on view at the Latvian National Museum of Art as part of the Purvītis Prize 2025 finalists’ exhibition, Watery Day’s Eye has taken on a slightly new form, adapting itself to the architecture and atmosphere of the museum space.
Indriķis Ģelzis turns his attention to the ‘liqui-modern’ individual engulfed by a sea of turbulent change. Mediated through our society living under the precondition of shattering flux that permeates the politics of relationships, identities and economics, Watery Day’s Eye is an ode to the personalized, analog cyberspace masquerading itself under the foil of visual resemblances and contextual meaning of the public swimming pool.
A folkloric, nature-inspired color palette casts the customary white walls of institutional normality with brightness. Flashes of experience and memory act as binders for sculptural appropriations of the infographic ecosystem in metal. Urban planning and the ebb and flow of the stock market are represented in the gallery via welded, bended, oiled artworks which absorb and entrap the shapes and forms of the living organisms and bodily details. While the functionally utilitarian details — tiles, carpets — of the living or communal spaces lying underneath, establish the rhythm-grid to which the emotional passage of the entire Watery Day’s Eye plays out.
The infinite space of an endlessly reflective mirrored surface is fixed with the precision of geometric zoning, while the meanings of its semantic core drift somewhere between the reflections of sea/water, the phone screen, or within each individual. The otherwise mute pool is punctured by verticality; the figures of larger-than-life chromed metal daisies pulsate ever so subtly at intervals of mechanical, short-cut jittery movements, as one must always be careful and stay on guard.
The immersive aspirations of this show are revealed in the looped streams of voice and light. The mood of the installation is successively shifted by sonic absurdities that defy its unambiguous interpretation or logic. In the intervals between the audial “ticks” and murmurs, which induce varying degrees of tension, Watery Day’s Eye flares up in the color of the digital water symbolizing the nutritional value of the daisies.
Emotional, adrift and clinging tightly to its corporeal and social backbone, Ģelzis’ installation is the result of transformative reflections made while being immersed in nature, the sea, the internet and, of course, the pool.
–Text by Zane Onckule
Transcript of the audio:
Chapter 1.
Brown earth turns into peanut butter, turns into a brown linoleum floor, turns into a brown background of a monitor, turns into a curled paper map, turns into a wrinkled skin of an eyelid, turns into hot and dry deserts, turns into sulphur. What supplies the flame in your throat?
Chapter 2.
Water flows into saliva, flows into liquid soap, flows into medicine, flows into tears, flows into tomato juice, flows into blood, flows into paint, flows into lava, flows into a geyser.
What does your body convey?
Chapter 3.
Sun burns into a dream, burns into a warm and blood-soaked heart, burns into a city light, burns into kidney pain, burns into a cigarette butt, burns into an advertising display screen, burns into a melting steel sphere, burns into tonsillitis.
How old is the cave of your lacrimal gland?
Chapter 4.
A droplet spins into a snowflake, spins into a feather, spins into an unidentifiable
bird, spins into an urban drone, spins into a fan, spins into a boat propeller, spins
into a daisy, spins into a clock.
From which eye are you falling?
Chapter 5.
A black hole expands into the pupil of the eye, expands into an ice hockey puck, expands into a mole hole, expands into a traffic tunnel, expands into an ear canal, expands into a funnel cloud, expands into a skull, expands into a stage, expands into a kaleidoscope, expands into an iPhone. Where is the house of the lost voice?
