To humans today, the ancient inhabitants of the planet resemble aliens from outer space, although, from a perspective of a deeper time, we ourselves are aliens, standing only in the antechamber of world history.

The alien beings, found in the formations and cast iron, are based on creatures that appeared on this planet more than 500 years ago and are still found today in the form of fossils. They are exhibited at the entrance of the Padure manor, greeting the one who arrives and suggesting a life that has been here before.

Photos – Kristīne Krauze Slucka, Atis Jākobsons

The environmental object Triality is a symbolic sculptural system, where long-extinct marine arthropods – trilobites – cast in aluminum, emerge as apparition along the banks of the Ālande River.

The structural foundation of the object draws on the nearby trial motorcycle park’s concrete forms. On one level, they resemble the industrial fossils of the park – remnants of past constructions and objects. On another, they speak as a collective whole: structures that serve as monuments to movement, much like archaeological cult sites.

The trilobites lie in the ground and concrete like silent messengers from prehistory, embodying layers of life and time converging in a single space, affirming the restlessness of movement, meditating and outside gaze – spanning life forms, epochs, and layers of human perception.

Photos – Kārlis Volkovskis, Ieva Viese

The prase "The Gaze Dissolves and Returns as Form" is a paradoxically expressed observation on the relationship between the seemingly immaterial and the material in theory and art. 

The starting point of the installation is a mutation within a laboratory environment – a trace of the act of observation and its impact. Engaging with film theory insights about the viewer’s capacity to construct narrative, the work both builds and disrupts causal relations of the visible. 

The installation comprises ceramic forms, cast-iron objects, and as other material and immaterial sculptural elements.

Photos – Ieva Viese

mimetolith (mǐ· mē· tō· lǐth) n. 1.a. a natural topographic feature, rock outcrop, rock specimen, mineral specimen, or loose stone the shape of which resembles something else -- e.g., a real or fancied animal, plant, manufactured item, or part(s) thereof (Dietrich, 1989)

This piece is a series of gradually deformed copies of a stone found on the shoreline, each iteration increasingly resembling a human heart. The object never fully becomes a heart – yet in the process it loses the very essence of being a stone, thus ironically exposing the human longing for emotional fulfillment in places where it is, in truth, not available.

Photos – Artūrs Arnis