ORLANDO. A BIOGRAPHY
29 silkscreen prints
This exhibition is homonymous with Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘Orlando. A Biography’ of 1928. The protagonist of the novel is not subject to gender or time constraints and lives a life of oscillating sex through the ages. This brave reevaluation of gender is one of the biggest values of the novel.
According to Jacques Lacan, any constant sensual and visual identity can only reach us as a gap between words and images. In this series of artwork I was interested in transforming reality into a traumatic phantasm or a dream in a dream. From random images and quotations resourced from the Internet, I have fabricated visual puns on distance, scarcity, desire and images of disintegrating identity and illusion as existing in indefinite time and space. My (photo) novel ‘ORLANDO. A BIOGRAPHY’ is inspired by the idea of the relativity of gender, but is no longer directly related with the original literature work. Nor does it necessarily have anything to do with our reality, but rather complements and extends its perception.
The way we consume images these days is based on watching versus perceiving or recognizing. We are tempted to believe that a good auto(photo)biography in the era of social networking is a life story of a person whom nobody has ever seen live.
Laisvydė Šalčiūtė