HOME SWEET HOME
2006 - 2009
A town is a place emerged by unification of people in groups to create environment for communication and entertainment, to have peace, protection and security. It is the place where people experience their fears, joys and worries; the place where people fight their battles of survival. Defining a town psycho-geographically it is environment that can be considered as the place created by collective emotional experience of society. Nowadays it is the place where the irrational, instinctive, forbidding, unconscious and spooky on the one hand meets the conscious, rational, visible and controlling forces of town unification on the other. The town functions as human consciousness where life drama of society takes place.
In the series of works 'Home Sweet Home' private houses are photographed in provincial towns of Latvia by night. Documental aspect of the series of photographs disclose architecture of private houses and their adherent surroundings making possible for a viewer to imagine a sum of individual and collective experiences hidden in walls and lightened windows of houses. Warm light in windows of houses speaks of physical and also psychological warmth and sanctuary in a symbolic way; although it is clear that a visual image is just a mean for consciousness to self-satisfy in stream of its experience.
The private houses intentionally chosen for documentation are those built in Soviet times and people who live there nowadays are pensioners. Little landed property at a private house is used as a cabbage-pat to grow vegetables and fruits for daily living and sometimes for selling. These private houses are specific visual evidences of fight for existence and survival in difficult economical conditions.
The series of works 'Home Sweet Home' are about living on the edge of survival, about the town as consciously organised environment though created and filled by irrational components, about individual and collective psychological and physical search of security and warmth, about symbols and codes what fill our daily life sometimes forcing to make conscious and unconscious choices.
© Alnis Stakle
photographs
Digital C-prints on aluminium, diasec 50cmx50cm (ed 12) / 100cmx100cm (ed 5)
2006 - 2009
A town is a place emerged by unification of people in groups to create environment for communication and entertainment, to have peace, protection and security. It is the place where people experience their fears, joys and worries; the place where people fight their battles of survival. Defining a town psycho-geographically it is environment that can be considered as the place created by collective emotional experience of society. Nowadays it is the place where the irrational, instinctive, forbidding, unconscious and spooky on the one hand meets the conscious, rational, visible and controlling forces of town unification on the other. The town functions as human consciousness where life drama of society takes place.
In the series of works 'Home Sweet Home' private houses are photographed in provincial towns of Latvia by night. Documental aspect of the series of photographs disclose architecture of private houses and their adherent surroundings making possible for a viewer to imagine a sum of individual and collective experiences hidden in walls and lightened windows of houses. Warm light in windows of houses speaks of physical and also psychological warmth and sanctuary in a symbolic way; although it is clear that a visual image is just a mean for consciousness to self-satisfy in stream of its experience.
The private houses intentionally chosen for documentation are those built in Soviet times and people who live there nowadays are pensioners. Little landed property at a private house is used as a cabbage-pat to grow vegetables and fruits for daily living and sometimes for selling. These private houses are specific visual evidences of fight for existence and survival in difficult economical conditions.
The series of works 'Home Sweet Home' are about living on the edge of survival, about the town as consciously organised environment though created and filled by irrational components, about individual and collective psychological and physical search of security and warmth, about symbols and codes what fill our daily life sometimes forcing to make conscious and unconscious choices.
© Alnis Stakle
photographs
Digital C-prints on aluminium, diasec 50cmx50cm (ed 12) / 100cmx100cm (ed 5)