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| Evita Vasiļjeva Santa Mičule, Art Academy of Latvia | |
| The young artist Evita Vasiļjeva (born 1985) graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia in 2009. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, where she has been a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie since 2009. Evita admits that the vibrant student and art life of Amsterdam is as a powerful source of inspiration, and right now she feels more of a connection with the art life of Amsterdam than the one in her native Latvia. Together with her fellow artists Vasiļjeva is active in the Last Minute Group which functions as an open platform for the students of Gerrit Rietveld to hold exhibitions and practice interdisciplinary art. In Latvia, on the other hand, Vasiļjeva is known due to her participation in a fairly wide range of cultural activities, including multimedia festivals (for example, the video art festival Waterpieces, the independent music and art festival Sound Forest) and group exhibitions (Autumn, at the Latvian Railway Museum, Causes and Consequences at kim? Contemporary Art Centre), as well as visual publications in culture magazines (Veto, kuš!, Popper Magazine). | |
 Evita Vasiļjeva. 2012 Photo from the private archive of Evita Vasiļjeva | |
| Evita Vasiļjeva works with a diverse range of artistic media, but lately she has been more active in performance art and video art. The artist describes her attitude towards video as the exten sion of sculpture into another dimension, creating multimedial and fluid works which merge art forms and the boundaries of artistic expression. The employment of various graphic effects is highly important in Evita’s video works, transforming the video screen into a digital canvas, likewise the use of sculptural ele ments in video installations, where they visually interact and enhance each other. Thus video functions as a reference to the socalled fine arts, and is, in a way, a return to them. The musical background is also an important feature in crafting message and mood, and in this her works come close to a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk concept, where the principle of harmonizing synthesis is supplemented with a redefinition of art forms and their traditional means of expression. In this case, the redefi nition operates as an extension of the formal structure of the artwork and an expansion of its dimensions, as can be seen, for example, in the installation Right on the Wrong Side (2011): the front side of the wooden wall has been joined to the back part by forcing the plaster from the rear through the gaps in the wood, thus adding a third dimension to the wall by making an appar ently flat surface appear bulky. The pun that was intended in the title of the work continues the game with the viewer’s per ception about the structure of the work and the possibilities provided by twodimensional forms. The work NO-PLACE (2011) has been devised as a synthesis of sculpture and video art in which the artist uses digital means to offer a witty insight into the relationship between sculpture and the environment. Vasiljeva creates special “conditions of ex istence” for her sculptures made of plaster and clothes by plac ing them into the photo pages of glamorous lifestyle magazines and using digital graphics to manipulate them. The sculptures could be compared to fragile and particularly demanding house plants which are able to survive (in Evita’s case – communicate with the viewer) only in a specially adapted environment and climate. The result is an unusual video installation where the images of the sculptures are projected onto an uneven surface with a wavelike silhouette, and where the documentation and representation of the artwork becomes its contents. This kind of strategy, to a large extent, is evident in another two of her works, where the focus is on various processes related to the creation of the work which are normally unseen to the naked eye once the objects are complete. This adds a biographical di mension to Evita’s art, and the author herself explains it as an attempt to imbue an emotionally human aspect to what we call contemporary art, which has become engulfed in cold perfec tionism and has pushed out of sight the artist as a psychological being. | |
 Evita Vasiļjeva. Making. Video installation. 2012 Publicity photos Courtesy of the artist | |
| The relationship between the artist and a female model has been brought to the fore in the video installation Making (2012), where Evita Vasiļjeva attempts to reveal the relations between the artist and the artwork, and also exhibits various video and spatial objects in a manner that allows them to complement one another. In the video Modelling on Thursday Night. Dressed (2012), Evita plays the posing model as well as the artist painting that same model, until the action melts into a dream the model is having about a walk in the park. In parallel with the simple subject matter – a painter concentrating on her work and the dreaming model – considerable attention is paid to the graphic processing of the video, the various elements of collage, colour and montage which contrive to make the action all the more dreamlike. The graphic processing is pointedly simple, it has not been turned into something illusory and in this way it exists as a decoratively selfcontained addition to the filmed material. Evita Vasiļjeva uses montage and the principles of fragmen tation both in the narrative and the visual expression of works in other art projects as well, including those that she has created in cooperation with Dutch artist Frederique Pisuisse. Acting is My Nature (2012) is a video documentary of Evita’s and Frederique’s first joint performances, offering an insight into their private and public performances. Acting is My Nature shows the two artists preparing for performances and other artistic undertakings, jest ing around with images from pop culture, and acting them out using vivid visual imagery and phrases which are out of context. The structure of the video and the forms of expression in it are reminiscent of pop music videos, artfully diluted with elements of psychedelic absurdity. This is especially evident if the work is viewed as a freestanding video collage rather than a perform ance rehearsal. The eccentric visual images to a great extent dominate over the action and the script in the joint work, leading the viewer to think that the main clue to their performances is to be found in their role plays and their flirting with various cul tural clichés of modern day culture. The music video as a cliché has been stripped to its bare bones in the video work Detox (2012), which is basically a loose linking up of the music and the picture, without adapting them to each other. The musical accompaniment becomes a thing in itself, and the images do not illustrate the music on the con trary, the girl seen in the video is engaged in everyday activities, for example, typing on an invisible computer keyboard, singing and moving out of synch with the wordless music. Musically the hypedup rhythm bears no relation to the simple flow of actions seen in the video, their mundane quality, and this contrast is in tensified by the inverse colour effect. The structure of the video could be metaphorically characterized as a piece of clothing worn inside out: it is a music video where the music never meets the video. All in all, the work characterizes Evita Vasiļjeva’s interest in the extension of the possibilities of art media and the trans formation of the conventional functions of art. Video does not function merely as a documentary medium – thanks to techno logical possibilities it actively participates in the transformation of the depicted reality and allows filmed material to be pre sented through the prism of subjectivity. Translator into English: Vita Limanoviča | |
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