Stavanger, Norway
In her exhibition The Rose Effect, Ingrida Mockutė-Pocienė includes a vast array of materials, among them documentation of her own sleep analysis; blurry pinhole camera images on expired Russian film paper; a crown made of thorns; photograms also made using thorns; architectural photography of tunnel-like spaces in neglected institutional buildings and apartments; a few large green photographs of parks; and objects from a family archive, including postcards and a traditional embroidery featuring roses. That there are no paintings in this multi-media collection is only logical, given its difficult task of bearing witness to trauma, a goal more directly serviced through the evidentiary and indexical media that Mockutė-Pocienė employs. Her artworks picture the places where events occurred, their effects, their traces, and their symbolic stand-ins, but mostly they are tasked with the impossible, to represent what can no longer be seen. The hallways of the mental hospital are empty; the thorns draw no blood; the face does not express what goes on its mind; the park is full of spring flowers, not the remains of a rape that happened there long ago. The artworks in The Rose Effect are hard to contemplate, though surely that is infinitely easier than having lived through the events that necessitated their eventual creation. The least we can do is bear witness, but hopefully we can do more.
—Lori Waxman March 16 2:05 PM