Laisvydė Šalčiūtė

Installation The Melo(dramas). The Un-Laid-Out, 2014​

Installation The Melo(dramas). The Un-Laid-Out, 2014

Danutė Gambickaitė, curator of the 2014 doctoral students’ exhibition, invited its participants to find ways to unveil to the public the nuts and bolts of their artistic research and the circumstances of influence on it. In this installation, I showed my intimately personal place of work, removed from its usual context and transplanted to the exhibition space. This way I revisited Bachelard’s and McLuhan’s ideas on human abodes. 

Installation The (Melo)dramas. The Room of Encounters, 2014

Installation The (Melo)dramas. The Room of Encounters, 2014 

This piece created for the Post-Idea III. Space, a group exhibition, dedicated to the pertinent art trends through the lens of female perception. Laima Kreivytė who curated the show encouraged the participating female artists to create artwork analysing the cultural constructs of ‘femininity’ through their relations with their biography and environment. 

In this piece, I revisit the aspects of the female body promoted most aggressively, by the postmodern consumer culture. In reference to Baudrillard’s claim that the status of the body is a cultural fact, while the organization of the relationship with the body reflects the ways of organization with things and social ties, I hone on, with a dose of self-ironical and criticism, the situation of our times. We see that in the public space, the advertising media present the woman as a field of activity by diverse body products.  

The (Melo)dramas. Leda’s Diaries, 2014

Solo exhibition The (Melo)dramas. Leda’s Diaries, 2014

This series of works revisits the classical myth of Leda and Zeus. The installation Leda’s Diaries is based on paintings, produced by the male artists throughout centuries (Corregio (1489 –1534), Paolo Veronese (1528 m – 1588), Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640), François Boucher (1703 – 1770) and other) to depict this particular plot. I have researched them online. I appropriate these images and create my own drawings to retell the myth. 

The installation is a visual rendition of the ‘female gaze’, the method I have practiced prior to this project. In the images downloaded from the Internet, I ‘capture’ a male gaze and transform its power discourse by using cinematographic image strategies, to render them as seen from a ‘female gaze’– e.g., my own way. My drawings where I copied the Leda’s mythological plot depicted by the famed artists are arranged in a sequence, on a horizontal ‘band’, which encircles the entire installation – a polyethylene room – creating a cinematographic effect. I seek to create the impression of movement and action symbolically stirring the stereotype of woman as a passive object epitomised in the paintings by these old masters.