I'm Launching a Shop
egmontas.com
I'd like to share a vision for a shop similar to an old used-book store, but found in a post-digital era where our dual-realities have become entangled. This might be an accurate description of a dream - I consider my work a bit like used-books: I picked it up, read it, learnt what I could and placed it on the shelf with the rest. Usually, the shelf is still hidden-away in the dark. At the start of this year I promised myself that I would stop clipping my own wings and learn to grow and fly with my work on my back outwards into the light and the sky. I’ve always loved shelves. They are inherently full of things placed considerately upon them. This is how I consider my hard drives - full of things. I’ve written a short text describing my work as a mountain of questions - imagine the shop is an attempt to consolidate the mass of the mountain into a belly full of things found on shelves and you can enter it.
One day I’d like to realise a synchronous real/digital worldspace. We might be able to move between material and bits. Until then, poetic thought still remains my bridge between our world and digitality. The first iteration of this shop will therefore be online, but with the promise of distributing physical items. This is a rather generic format, but the goal is first: accessibility. Around 2018, I made a decision to invest my time almost entirely into digital practice. I’ve now concluded that these works need to take on a physical presence in our world. In order to dream of a bridge, I have to explore how I’d implicate my work as that bridge. I'm incredibly excited by the prospect of reinventing how this work should live on, and how it might appear. Hopefully, these objects can live on in other spaces and thus traces of poetry will scatter across the world.
My initial thought is to manifest the work in four formats:
The Print - having grown up with collectibles like the trading card, the vinyl, CD and the DVD, and more recently the museum gift card: these are examples of what a print is to me. A picture in paper form, a distributable memory. I'd like to explore the entirety of the item, how it is packaged and presented.
The Display - I look into screens all day. Further inspired by childhood objects such as the pokedex and digivice; artists like Jeff Wall working with light-boxes and an otherwise obviously prevalent monitor culture. The display seems to present an opportunity for us to see a world light up and enter into.
The Figurine - the toy, the model, the thing. I want things on shelves so that you can pick them up and play with them.
The Book - what is a shelf without a book?
There is then the money question - the tool that displaces the used-book and gives it a new home. I've only once before put my work on sale. This was during the NFT boom in the spring of 2021. Now but even then I’ve been reluctant to place a price on what I spend my time on. As a kid, I made the decision to become an artist. Since then, I've moved in and around art as a professional discipline, producing work that aligns with my vision of the world but never monetising. I'm now determined it’s time to expose the value of the work, and in turn help my visions grow. I will be investing the money earned from sales directly into the growth of this shop and my artistic practice.
I’ve acquired egmontas.com to host the shop. The first works on sale are the digital flowers. I have an ongoing theme in my work that an object can be made to reflect a person's desires. My flowers are an initial attempt to collect desires and manually input them into a system to grow flowers representative of them.
The mountain needs a name.