Image Steps Out of the Page

From July 1st to August 20th, the exhibition "Image Steps Out of the Page" by Agnes Čemme can be viewed at the Ojārs Vācietis Museum, located at 19 Ojāra Vācietis Street in Riga. The exhibition takes place within the framework of the Riga News Festival called "Sābrs". Its focus is on zines - small artistic publications - and the festival aims to strengthen the collaboration between artists and small publishers, as well as to introduce the wider public to this art form.

Agnes Čemme was inspired by the graphic art created by Ojārs Vācietis in the creation of this exhibition. The artist explains her work on the exhibition: "A brick motif with ink images running across it. Its feet firmly hold onto the bottom edge of the page, with a hole in the center of its body. It could be a plant or a vine on an exterior wall, extending like an ink spill, reaching for the next word in the writer's hand."

Fransisco Goya's painting "Saturn Devouring His Son" from the "Black Paintings" series comes to mind. It was painted on one of the walls at his residence. The image of Saturn and the entire scene embody chaos and emptiness, the states before new creation. The writer sits at a table, drawing circles, perhaps containing words, some of which need to be lost, maybe even in such a terrifying scene...

Ojārs Vācietis walked around with eight sketches in his pocket, and they were completely different characters, perhaps found on the shores of Mara's Pond. When I looked at a part of the poet's drawing archive, one black and white drawing caught my attention because it was unclear and looked unfinished. However, the background motif can be read clearly, and this motif fits into my pocket, I carried it with me and broke it into pieces. A brick has a simple modular form, with the same rhythm it can be used to build other forms like Tetris, which holds together well. Or the wall of a house, the courtyard walls that separate the garden from the neighbors, with green shoots that turn red in the autumn. I think Vācietis reached for something to write, knocked over an ink pot, and later covered the spilled ink on the brick background. It may not mean anything, and this image transforms into a sentence that steps out of the page."

Agnes Čemme (1989) is a visual artist who lives and works in Riga. In 2017, she graduated from the Ceramics Department of the Latvian Academy of Arts. She also studied as part of the Erasmus exchange program at ArtEz University of the Arts in the Netherlands, in the Fine Arts Sculpture Department. Since 2014, she has participated in exhibitions in Latvia and abroad, and has had the opportunity to stay at the Cité des Arts residency in Paris twice. In 2020, she established a ceramic studio in Pārdaugava, where she conducts individual masterclasses and workshops. In the spring of 2021, she founded and manages Ag Gallery in Riga, which hosts an active contemporary art program featuring both Latvian and foreign artists. In her works, the artist uses various techniques - text, collage, graphics, and ceramics - as metaphors for independent movement through the flow of information. In recent years, the silhouette and shadow have become important elements in her works, evoking a series of associations in the viewer about the perception of the individual between language, its background, and images. With simple techniques, images are created that invite us to question our own perception of objects and the accepted system of concepts."