The body remembers through touch. The new drawings made especially for KristaVindberga-Auzniece’s solo exhibition emerge through repetition, silence and concentration, with one movement slowly following the next until time accumulates in the surface. Charcoal crumbles, slips from the control of the hand and is worked into the carefully prepared canvas; each subsequent touch retains the trace of the one before, turning duration into a material quality of the image.
Vindberga-Auzniece’s particular sensitivity, a heightened sense of presence akin to falling inlove or some other intoxicating state, meets images from a time that belonged to others. Old family albums become starting points for prolonged looking, where a smile, a hand on a shoulder, a dance step, a fold of fabric or flowers held with ceremonial seriousness acquire a new kind of attention, bringing peripheral details into focus.
The contours of these drawings on canvas and paper grew out of this meditative rhythm, in which movement becomes a form of contemplation. The artist’s hand is at once an instrument, a measuring device and a bearer of memory. The drawing takes on sculptural contours, its surface holding the pressure of the palm, the imprints of fingers and movements causing persistent friction, pushed to the point of drawing blood, leaving the artist’s body legible within the image.
The photographic source material comes from the artist’s personal archive: faded black-and-white and sepia images of lives past. Enlarged, sometimes hundreds of times, these images shift in weight and meaning as the scale redistributes attention. The miniature acquires massand a musculature of meaning; the passing moment gains permanence, while an unfamiliar gesture or posture becomes strangely recognisable. Images fixed long before the artist’s birth enter a field in which personal and collectivememory overlap. Retrospective looking – individual, capricious and selective – becomes entangled with a broader field of memory, where the past returns through body language: agesture, a posture, a hand, a way of holding oneself before the camera.
In Circles Are Better Than Lines, a shift of a single degree from the upper edge of the frame introduces a slight refusal of alignment, a deliberate accident levitating within the otherwise anonymous white field. Across two dozen drawings, these disturbances draw the viewer into a labyrinth of proximity and distance, where perception takes shape through approach, withdrawal and return. A line moves forward, accepting a beginning and an end, while a circle arranges and rearranges the breath and rhythm of the line, folding its movement back into itself. The circle gives the line another temporality, based on recurrence. Are circles better than lines then? As angular and static propositions, they both work.