Vida Meić / Sediments

Solo exhibition

Vida Meić's solo exhibition created in collaboration with the Amadeo Stage.

FROM THE EXHIBITION FOREWORD

Everything passes, only the curl is permanent, Arsen Dedić added to the melancholic generality. Nevertheless, everything remains. In geology, archaeology and psychology, time leaves traces. They are layers of earth stacked on top of each other, the foundations of collapsed buildings, rusted or chipped utility objects, graves and bones of our ancestors in them, and then, a little deeper, the bones of protozoa, or the fossilized remains of ancient flora and fauna. Both oil and coal are traces of the former living world. Rocks are sometimes formed by sedimentation, revealing their layers when a piece breaks off. Our personalities are also created by deposition – by layering memories, beautiful and bad memories, traumas and feelings of elation, which are sometimes reawakened by a smell, a scene, an object. Or nothing wakes them up, but everything comes uninvited and suddenly.

Such deposition (psychological and physical) is dealt with by Vida Meić. Always interested in structure, stain, matter, that is, in that basic element of artistic expression (in which the viewer writes his interpretations), she now analyzes the visual language relying on the metaphor of sedimentation. Sediments are at the same time what is hidden and what reveals the past, the passage of time or the existence of some different circumstances.

Vida's new objects also refer to deposition and layering with their material. They were created from restls, i.e. from the cut remains of prints from her previous cycles. It is a discarded material in which the author has found a new fascination. However, she does not stop at exhibiting these blocks of paper. Their story continues in art books in which she makes a small lexicon of graphics through these objects. There are prints of the spines of objects, their photogrammetry, drawings of their shadows, their photographs, pages that in some way thematize their form in screen printing, cyanotype or intaglio printing. Why are these cakes so interesting to her that she dedicates entire books to them? Perhaps the artist's past (past work) is sedimented in them, and her previous knowledge of graphic techniques and procedures (along with drawing, often inseparable from graphic art).

The prints she presents at this exhibition are characterized by exceptional finesse. They are printed from the backgrounds of the matrices, which in this case are zinc and cardboard. Vida (here, as in her previous cycles) is interested in errors and coincidences, structures over which she has no control, accumulations and deposits of colors and oils on the backgrounds of the matrices that she now discovers by printing. This time she prints on 9-gram Manila paper, and exposes the thin prints together, that is, one above the other. Their transparency creates the effects of tones, and it seems as if they describe depth. Some abstract depth of a dream or a state of altered consciousness.

The poetic spirit that radiates throughout this exhibition, the sensibility that emanates from all the objects, pages of books and elaborate prints, can stimulate many thoughts about its basic theme – deposition as a physical trace of the passage of time. But, what if we just let sediments exist, unburdened by interpretations and poetizations? What if we only admire their interesting games of layers and the effects that these games produce in our minds? Both time and matter and our spirit that exists together with them and inseparably from them are part of reality, whose character we could call continuous existence. Each moment of reality lies on top of the previous one. And sediments are the effects of that existence.

Feđa Gavrilović

BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR

Vida Meić (1991, Čakovec) graduated in graphics in the class of Prof. Ines Krasić from the Department of Teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb with honors Summa Cum Laude. She is the winner of seven awards for artistic work, including the Erste Grand Prix, the NSK Graphic Collection Award and the MSU Award. She has exhibited at about thirty group exhibitions and five solo exhibitions. She is employed as an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb.

You can see the exhibition in the Šira Gallery during the working hours of the Gallery (Mon-Fri: 9-16 h, 18-20 h, Saturday: 11-16h) until 29.7.2023.

The exhibition was realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the City Office for Culture, Intercity and International Cooperation and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb and the Croatian Museum of Natural History.