The Big Picture

The exhibition presents the works by the gallery’s represented and guest artists. The participating artists encourage you to rethink the relation between daily life and artistic reality and offer an alternative to a representational group show aiming at universality and generalization.
The participating artists, each in their unique way and from different perspectives – through the conceptualization of the media and authentic or pseudo-authentic personal stories, through a dispute with cultural history and popular culture, through the research into daily life and urban anthropology – explore the relation between artistic representation and reality. The title of the exhibition “The Big Picture” refers to the individual and collective goal to create a big picture of reality or convey it through images. However, rather than offering the fully formed unique “grand” narrative, to which the title apparently points, the exhibition explores the (im)possibility of that big picture. Each artist, using his or her visual language and means of expression, contributes to the search for the big picture, until the illusoriness of this ever expanding and not fully comprehensible process is finally revealed. The picture created in the exhibition both represents community and unmasks its fictitiousness.
The form of exhibiting the works in this show reflects the features of today’s information consumption. The general visuality of contemporary communication and new habits of watching developed by screens (the ability and need to see many images at the same time) dictated a concentrated and rich exhibition-installation. Layered and arranged according to the collage principle, the works intertwine and overlap, thus forming a thick coagulation of images reminiscent of an incessant stream of information impulses. Concentrated in a small space, the artists’ works correlate among themselves in different ways: they supplement each other or polemicize with each other, creating a wide set of possible combinations and ways of reading the exhibition, from separate works to the installation as a whole. Contemporary technology-based communication (and miscommunication) opens a possibility of information glitches and unexpected, even absurd images and semantic combinations. This results in the formation of a multi-narrative story, a kind of network of meanings reflecting the multi-faceted character and heterogeneity of artistic work. Thus, a homogeneous voice of a generation gives way to a polyphonic polylogue of young creators.
With the aim to expand the semantic field of the exhibition’s narratives, the paintings and drawings by the artists permanently represented by the gallery – Kristina Ališauskaitė, Adomas Danusevičius, Alina Melnikova, Auksė Miliukaitė, Vita Opolskytė and Andrius Zakarauskas – are supplemented by paintings, illustrations, photographs and sculptural objects by artists occasionally collaborating with the gallery – Kazimieras Brazdžiūnas, Tomas Daukša, Staselė Jakunskaitė, Audronė Vaupšienė and Visvaldas Morkevičius. Palanga Street Radio also joins the exhibition. This collective initiative connecting music, visual arts and social, communal ideas will supplement the exhibition’s artefacts with sounds and will continue it in the form of internet radio broadcasts.
The exhibition at The Rooster Gallery will be open until March 24.

Opening hours of the gallery: Tuesday through Friday, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.