NYAB Event - Lidija Slavkovic “A Plan: Vacation”

Lidija Slavkovic “A Plan: Vacation”

Vendome Projects

This event has ended.

The title of the exhibition A Plan: Vacation has a double meaning – the most obvious is one’s associations with seascapes and landscapes as vacation destinations. But the more important aspect is that the title reflects how Slavkovic thinks about retrieving her imagery from what are generally considered “Landscapes,” and therefore immediately being reduced to metaphor. In this context the term “A Plan” refers to her view that a drawing is no more than a plan (procedures and preparations) and as such a proposition - concerning the objectification of some concept, which is always incomplete. For Slavkovic plans exist in time and are subject to change and therefore her drawings are less a statement of intention, than a statement of her attention. Likewise, her use of the term “vacation” refers to the “action of leaving something one previously occupied” and to vacate: “to render inoperative; deprive of validity; void; annul” those concepts preconception, assumptions and habits that precede her and the viewers’ experience. As such, her drawings are the result of her trying to make inoperative the common understanding of Landscape as a symbol of something.

“I see my work as an object of attention, in that the work is a reflection of my relationship to some ‘thing’,” says Slavkovic. “I acknowledge that my concept is only an impermanent objectification of sensation, thus I think of my drawings not as an art work but as the result of the work of art.”

Slavkovic employs various techniques and a contemporary perspective to map and expose the layered possibilities that lie between abstraction, materiality, and the effects of time. She begins her drawings by tracing a projected image and then treats each element – line, form, surface, etc. as if it has an existence of its own. By these means, she is able to articulate what each element shares with the others.

The fact that Slavkovic’s works juxtapose differing approaches in constructing her images of the landscape is a consequence of her recognition that the process of transcription is separate from the ability to transform the contingent content of her drawings into mere images of landscape. It is through this flux that her drawings represent our contemporary condition in which the partial overlap or intersection of things leads to each potentiality standing for some other. In this way, Slavkovic’s landscapes become a subspecies of the genre Landscape, which is both defined and negated by its actualization.