In his most spacious exhibition to date, Indriķis Ģelzis turns his attention to the ‘liqui-modern’individual engulfed by a sea of turbulent change. Mediated through our society living under the precondition of shattering flux that permeates the politics of relationships, identities and economics, Watery Day’s Eye is an ode to the personalized, analogue cyberspace masquerading itself under the foil of visual resemblances and contextual meaning of the public swimming pool.
A folkloric, nature-inspired color palette casts the customary white walls of institutional normality with brightness. Flashes of experience and memory act as binders for sculptural appropriations of the infographic ecosystem in metal. Urban planning and the ebb and flow of the stock market are represented in the gallery via welded, bended, oiled artworks which absorb and entrap the shapes and forms of the living organisms and bodily details. While the functionally utilitarian details – tiles, carpets – of the living or communal spaces lying underneath, establish the rhythm-grid to which the emotional passage of the entire Watery Day’s Eye plays out.
The infinite space of an endlessly reflective mirrored surface is fixed with the precision of geometric zoning, while the meanings of its semantic core drift somewhere between the reflections of sea/water, the phone screen, or within each individual. The otherwise mute pool is punctured by verticality; the figures of larger-than-life chromed metal daisies pulsate ever so subtly at intervals of mechanical, short-cut, jittery movements, as one must always be careful and stay on guard.
The immersive aspirations of this show are revealed in the looped streams of voice and light. The mood of the installation is successively shifted by sonic absurdities that defy its unambiguous interpretation or logic. In the intervals between the audial “ticks” and murmurs, which induce varying degrees of tension, Watery Day’s Eye flares up in the color of the digital water symbolizing the nutritional value of the daisies.
Emotional, adrift and clinging tightly to its corporeal and social backbone, Ģelzis’ installation is the result of transformative reflections made while being immersed in nature, the sea, the internet and, of course, the pool.
Choreography: during the phases of the white bulbs lit “daylight”, the set of daisy sculptures mechanically “ticks” cutting into the serenity of the exhibition; they freeze in motion and sound as the installation overcasts to a blue “watery” illumination, accompanied by an audio narrative representing the natural elements – earth, water, fire, air and ether.
