In her debut solo show COMFORTABLY UNCOMFORTABLE Bagdonaitė presents a new collection of paintings exploring the key themes of her practice: translation of image, notion of home, loss of identity through abandonment, and the fragility of time. She explores these themes through a personal and unseen- reaching into a sense of collective memory.
The name of the exhibition does not hide, but on the contrary, it bluntly expresses the emotional condition of migration. In Bagdonaitė’s case her migration is voluntary, therefore she prefers to talk about the impossibility of ‘home’ in a more abstract sense that feeds into her paintings. This notion is recognisable to anyone who romanticises their childhood home that is no longer accessible, regardless of the distance. Bagdonaitė asks the question, what is/makes home? Is it positioned somewhere in the place, people, feeling, melancholia, and abandonment? Where does home reside? Is it the place or the memories? Bagdonaitė explores these questions through the nostalgic, uncanny, and unheimlish narratives of her paintings.
The narrative is inserted through the juxtaposition of images from her personal photography archive and carefully curated imagery of museum glass cabinets filled with taxidermied animals. Bagdonaitė questions if memories can be archived through photography in the same way that taxidermy animals are always portrayed in motion, as if they were alive. Within these narratives she is feverishly looking for familiarity in different environments. Through transition in time, place, and ‘home’, she blurs the lines of the past and the present, creating fictional story lines that connect different memories and places to create stories where an alter ego can exist. The use of repetitive motifs, blur tones, strong overlays and dotted patterns creates a distance from the owner of the image and portrays more of a feeling or a sensation. There is a sense of collective memory in the work, as if it is something you have seen, felt or remember as well… At least some of you will…
Haley Craw
ingridabagdonaite.com 