Impressions of art exhibitions in Riga on October 18, 2019

     This year October 18th Aluksne Art School teachers together with 3rd-7th grade students went on an educational field trip to visit topical art exhibitions in Riga. In order for the exhibition attendance to be memorable, to enable learners to reflect more deeply on what they saw, and to delve deeper into its content and form, each student had to analyze their impressions and provide answers to the questions formulated by the educators in the worksheets.
     First of all, in Riga, we visited the Arsenāls Exhibition Hall, where in the creative workshop we explored the stage image created by the stage designer Andris Freibergs for the opera "Iemūrētie" at the exhibition "136 pakāpieni". The exhibition title symbolically contained the artist's own 80 years of life and 56 steps we had to walk to get to the exhibit. To reflect the theme, Freibergs moderated the language of the exhibition at the same time as a stage designer and director, enabling the viewer to enter the artist's living space through symbolic steps of life, perceiving its presence with unconventional feelings.
      At the Art Museum Riga Bourse, we visited the exhibition "Metaphysics of Light" dedicated to the creative work of the outstanding Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky. This exhibition brought to light works of art in which lighting and light are a key component of the composition and combines a single dominant theme - variations in lighting, reproducing the artist's elaborate mastery of painting on canvas, such as water, light and space, enchanting the viewer.
In an unconventional view of the world, we were introduced by the artists Mastiņa-Pēterkopa and Rolands Pēterkops, or duet "Mareunrol's" in the exhibition ‘’Augmented Reality’’ at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design. In Latvia, the duo of artists “Mareunrol’s” is mainly known as artists who have modeled costumes for many theater and opera performances. Though the works of this exhibition allow the viewer to look at the authors' message in a much wider perspective. The artist duo Mareunrol's have interpreted the idea of the exhibition as follows: “Fashion is like information contained in codes; they need to be able to read them, building new ones from existing codes to move on, because that is the only possible way to develop, creating the collective subconscious as a driving force for development. ”
       As part of our trip, at the Daugava Art Gallery, we visited a sculptural exhibition entitled "Zvērīgā spēle," by sculptor Aigars Bikše, in which the artist personally expresses his feelings in Japan at a time of political conflict between North Korea and the United States and when air defense missile equipment was stationed on the streets of Tokyo for security purposes. "Surikats uz mīnas", "Zaķis ar granātu ķepā" and other sculptural works symbolically visualize military armament as a deliberately cultivated "monstrous reality game" played out on our planet from time to time. It was a valuable experience for us all to understand the language of sculpture, making us think of a topic so important to PEACE and LIFE!