Eyelash Fortress marks Indriķis Ģelzis’s third solo exhibition with Suprainfinit, transforming the gallery into an odyssey that navigates between reality and dream, awakening and digital frenzy. Hovering across shifting conditions of form, attitude, and economy, the artist’s practice unfolds as a continuous excavation within the shattering flux that surrounds society and underpins every relationship.
As a bricoleur of analogue and digital rhythms and shapes, Ģelzis imprints flashes of infographic visuals and metadata into his sculptural works, elements that permeate our daily routines and brain. The physicality of his practice emerges from a complex process: digital imagery, jolted by streams of statistical data, is translated into anthropomorphised and hybrid creatures that both surveil and embrace our presence.
When was the last time you felt displaced from a tangible context, your body divid- ed into a silhouette at once human, plant, and nonhuman?
Stepping into the gallery, perceptions of time and space begin to shift, almost negating prior understandings of gravity and realness. Photons of intense blue light flood the space every three minutes, uttering fragments from Watery Day’s Eye, a five-part ode written by the artist. Composed in a stream-of-consciousness style, the text emerges from childhood memories and recent experiences, wavering between lived events and fantasy.
Water flows into saliva
Flows into lava
What does your body convey?
A droplet spins into a snowflake
From which eye are you falling?
Sun burns into kidney pain
Burns into an advertising display screen
Brown earth turns into peanut butter
Turns into a brown linoleum floor
A black hole expands into an ice hockey puck
Expands into a mole hole
Where is the house of the lost voice?
Flashes of experience and memory act as binding agents for the five sculptural metal flowers, conceived in dialogue with the sound and lighting choreography. Positioned as both monstrous and protective sentinels, they crawl down the gallery walls, luring viewers into their cold, mirrored daisy heads. These larger-than-life chromed daisies adapt to the artificial environment while inviting visitors to attune to their mechanical, jittery movements. Reflecting on the aesthetics and logic of television game shows, Ģelzis adapts this language into a multisensory installation, posing implicit questions: How do you feel in public space? What forms of information shape your perception? How does data surrounding us mold experience? Yet, within his work, there is no chance to respond, the viewer is inside the system, but not in control.
Breaking away from game logic, Eyelash Fortress functions as a protective shield that simultaneously enables and disables the constant flow of information to which we are constantly plugged to. Acting as a gatekeeper of data, it gently moves its lashes to only fuse with the personalised “cookies” we accept on our screens.
Across the space, Wave Into Knot, a statuary, headless figure contorts the positive and negative signal lines of infographics into sartorial metallic limbs, as if corpore- ality was reassembled within an instrumentalised human body. One part flows and undulates; the other knots and tangles, transforming social anxiety into cycles of creation and transformation.
Unravelled in condensed, polished stainless-steel forms, the Time Camouflage series explores distorted vision and the invisible layers embedded within shapes.
A cave becomes a mouth; a closed eye becomes a hole or a shelter; a stone opens into an abyss.
As one exits the space-shuttle of the artist’s mind, fragments of materials and data continue to mingle. As suggested in the sound piece, water becomes blood, earth becomes skin, fire becomes memory. Each element moves relentlessly, transform- ing in their quest to adapt and belong. Through open-ended questions and Ģelzis’s distinctive visual language, the works echo the world as a hybrid entity. One that seeps beneath our second skin, searching for an endless chemistry between bio-logical and mechanical bodies.
–Curatorial text by Cristina Vasilescu
Indrikis Gelzis (LV, 1988) lives and works in Riga. He holds an MA in Visual Communication from the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga (LV) and a Post-Graduate degree from HISK – Higher Institute for Fine Arts (BE). He had exhibitions at a.o. Polina Berlin, NY (US); Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (LV); Castor, London (UK); ASHES/ASHES NY (US); King’s Leap, NY (US); SUPRAINFINIT, Bucharest (RO); Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE); CAC Vilnius, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre Riga / Milwaukee Sculpture (US), among others.
