Darius Kuzmickas - Camera Obscura: Modern Primitivism

New exhibition at Vilnius Photography Gallery, Stikliu g. 4, Vilnius, Lithuania

2008.05.22 - 2008.06.15

"The apparatus is deceivingly simple: a carved out pinpoint, a thin rayof filtered light, a darkened room and a blank surface upon which an image is reborn in softfocus. The light brushes itself in faint, wispy strokes across the page, the way memory might capture a scene, blurring its edges a bit in translation. Pinhole photography (or the camera obscura) is a heavily intuitive process concerned more with creating a mood than delivering an image wrapped in the trappings of reality. Simple in theory, the process, predating modern photography, is quite tricky. What isn't left to luck is owed to plenty of practice, precision and experimentation, all of which are evident in photographer Darius Kuzmickas' ethereal collections.

Viewing Kuzmickas' work is akin to entering a strange, otherworldly universe, equal parts foreign and familiar. In a series taken at Utah's Great Salt Lake, precariously upright pillars emerge from what could be construed as either dry desert lakebeds or glacial, snowcovered tundra. The ambiguity sets the viewers' imagination free to impart its own story, invent its own memory. The swirls of darkened background clouds impart a feeling of impenetrable cold, which, combined with the barren mood evoked by the crumbly salt pillars, resembles something out of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Chillingly apocalyptic, and yet, at the same time, each piece exudes the lingering warmth of recent discovery and fresh, new vision, allowing the mood to linger far longer than the specific details, settling deep within the mind's landscape as memory does; reflective and misty; abstract and obscured."

Excerpts from essay by Kelle Schillaci

Also, selections from "After Glow", a new series of pinhole photographs, that capture the eerie flip-side of daylight in the Neon Homeland. In these "lensless" pictures the glitz and glam of Las Vegas Strip give way to a dream-like reality suffused with the light and emotional timbre of a solar eclipse.