Tree Spirit

2020

(Ogre, Latvia) 

Oil painting with found plastics 

Gremzde's current practice explores the relationship between humans and nature referring to landscape as a portrait of nature. Facing the world today the landscape has become not only a portal through which to consider traditional notions of beauty and the sublime, but also a framework to examine society, identity and ecology. Works seek to reflect the relationship between humans and nature, regarding nature as a focus for the formation of individual and community's identity. Growing alienation from nature, habitation in cities and dominating consumer lifestyle results in more time spent in constructed, artificial spaces monitored by surveillance cameras, like shopping malls and waiting halls defined as non-places while being a real measure of our time have no identity, relations and history. A juxtaposed scene of nature looked at closely can reveal a secret life, a narrative and history outside the given field of perception.