Studio Visit
Karlis Rekevics in conversation with ERIC GELBER
all installation
shots are from the Triangle International Workshop open studios in June
2004
(work subsequently destroyed)
Karlis Rekevics
is at the beginning of his career, and yet his work doesn't bring to
mind any other artist. His complex white plaster sculptures, cast from
molds made of plywood, masonite and blue foam, are multi-part forms
with neon tubes and/or light bulbs attached to them. They are intuitively
composed amalgamations of anonymous objects found in the urban landscape
or other places the artist has visited throughout his life and products
of his imagination and drawing process.
"Rather than
having a dialogue with artwork, I think my job is to try and do something
different. I really tried not to have my work become commentary on the
art world. I feel that an artist has to find another way." He recently
had the largest exhibit of his work to date at Triangle Studios in Dumbo,
Brooklyn. The Triangle Artist's Workshop, founded in 1982 by the British
sculptor Anthony Caro and Robert Loder, a collector, has become a very
important residency program for young artists. It brings artists from
around the world together under the same roof.
"What I love
about Triangle is that it is dedicated to people who make things, whatever
medium they work in. It is not about conceptualization, it is actually
about getting your hands dirty and making something." I had the
opportunity to speak with Rekevics on the last day of the exhibit. This
is a busy time for him. When I entered the exhibit he was seated at
a table and examining slides of his work with an intense expression
on his face. He had a lackluster undergraduate experience. He made the
wise decision of foregoing graduate school and started to work in theater
design, working as a master carpenter at the Manhattan Theatre Club
for five years. He discovered his true calling while he attended the
New York Studio School up until 1996.
The son of an architect,
Rekevics started to build things early on. "I helped my father
build his house starting at the age of 10 and it was completed when
I was about 16." Surprisingly, he feels uneasy about having his
work referred to as architecture. "It is too easy to say that I
do architectural work. To me that is almost too obvious and I do not
think that is what is driving it. I think about the little things in
between the buildings and on the streets. I'm not really thinking about
architecture." Rekevics is completely unfazed about the fact that
he has not sold any of his work yet. He will be facing a dilemma when
the first interested buyer comes along because he dismantles and destroys
all of his sculptures after an exhibit ends. The sculptures in the Triangle
exhibit take up a huge room and consist of "six tons of plaster."
Memories of specific
forms or the arrangement of forms are the inspiration for these sculptures.
They come into existence through the process of drawing, which Rekevics
does constantly. "I draw, remember, draw some more, then some dominate
images start to reveal themselves."
Rekevics' sculptures
draw attention to banal, often ignored aspects of the urban environment.
The forms he models his shapes on are familiar to viewers, but the whiteness
of the plaster emphasizes a self referential quality. The separate components
are connected with a screw gun or glue gun and conjure forth images
of city streets, highways, buildings and sidewalks, but at the same
time, they refuse to gel perfectly. The fragmentary quality of these
sculptures and Rekevics use of light sources call our attention to the
details and surface textures, the interaction of lines and the odd angles
formed by the placement of the sculptures. Forms overlap and suck the
viewer's gaze and wandering body into the physical spaces between sculptures.
Rekevics is more about poetic fragments than tableaus.
The mimetic aspect
of Reskevics' work is entirely the product of memory. "The work
started to come out of my life. Then it became a choice. I am going
to make things out of my daily existence. The things I see, the things
that effect me, the things I remember, the things that are curious to
me, the things that make me laugh. Whatever it is I get excited about.
When I started to work that way, I didn't have time to go out in the
landscape and draw anymore. So I started to remember things, to do things
out of memory, which changed my perspective. One of my earlier pieces
was just about driving to work everyday. I would go home to my studio
and I'd start to draw. What did I remember? Then I would build things
and play with them as a whole object. Then I would think about what
the thing I am making needs. I would see something that would help me
solve a problem." He never casts shapes from real objects.
The shapes his sculptures
refer to, payphone shells, store facades, doorways, signs and billboards,
construction scaffolding, I-Beams, cement dividers found on highways
and city streets, cinder blocks, and ramps leading to nowhere are registered
unconsciously by city dwellers. Every sculpture he makes is the product
of a specific memory. But his work is also about the fragmentation of
memory. He does not want to create a specific locale top to bottom,
but is interested in marginalia or isolated shapes or structural passages.
His sculptures are somewhat disjointed - I-beam shapes are set at odd
angles forming a roof, cinder block shapes are strewn across the ground,
the skeleton of a billboard is illuminated by yellowy lightbulbs. This
transforms the homogenous into something contemplative.
Rekevics invents
forms, such as the supports for the large ramp and the pillars that
hold up an interesting block shape in the Triangle installation. Sometimes
these invented forms solve technical problems but they are also pure
invention. The parts of the sculptures which resemble familiar objects
are different from the actual objects in subtle ways, so that remembering
how something looks becomes a creative act. Rekevics is not interested
in making replicas of the real, but in capturing the often ignored Spartan
and ephemeral beauty of the non-commercial aspects of the urban landscape.
Rekevics also self consciously includes billboard and sign shapes in
his sculptures which are blank, missing what is essential to their being,
the advertisement. The sculptures are therefore also concerned with
the way the gaze of the pedestrian is manipulated by the systems we
pass through in urban settings, how our eyes are drawn to certain things
which we barely register on a conscious level. The invented forms and
the forms closely based on real objects blend together. The viewer is
placed in a quasi-real place that relates to the real, has an aura of
the familiar, but also subtly diverges from it, and inevitably refers
to itself.
Plaster is the perfect
material for Rekevics because of its transformative power. "I love
plaster's inertness, its intrinsic beauty. Plaster has been around forever.
It is a very affordable material. I love the fact that plaster is strong
and fragile simultaneously, and that it's ephemeral. I can take one
of these things, bust it up and put it in a bucket of water and pour
it into another mold. Basically I can transform it into whatever I want
it to be." Using plaster allows Rekevics to emulate any industrial
material; glass, corrugated steel, cement, plywood. Plaster has traditionally
been used to make copies of existing forms, or to patch or even out
surfaces. Rekevics builds three dimensional forms with plaster and he
likes to incorporate accident and contingency into the work.
Rekevics closely
examines the world we live in. He wants us to think about the systems
we entrust our daily routines and movements to. He combines imaginary
forms with perception based forms and invites us to explore the terrain
he builds and the terrain outside the walls of the gallery. "I
want to reinvigorate the art of just looking around, without ideas,
judgment or purpose, to enjoy the fact that we can see, hear, feel,
and touch." Rekevics sculpture is powerful because it is perception
based. The sculptures are self referential but they constantly call
to mind our everyday experience, and we begin to explore what was once
invisible or ignored once we leave the exhibit. "Life will fail
the idea because life isn't about ideas it's about living."
