Reinis Lismanis (1992, Latvia) is an artist currently living and working in London, UK. Lismanis graduated from University of Brighton in 2014 receiving the Tom Buckeridge Photography Award. In 2017 Lismanis had his first solo show at the ArsenÄls Exhibition Hall of Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. Since 2012 his work has been exhibited in group shows in China, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the UK. Reinis Lismanis has been a selected participant of Plat(t)form 2016 at Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland) and Full Contact 2014 at SCAN Tarragona International Festival of Photography (Spain). Author’s works have been published in Aesthetica Magazine, Source Photographic Review, Laboratori (Ca l’Isidret Edicions), Latvian Photography 2015 (FK Magazine), and The Telegraph. Lismanis’ project Sharp Edges was nominated twice for Photo London and Magnum Photos Graduate Photographers Award. Upcoming exhibitions include Riga Photomonth 2018.
Ideas, methods and technical processes are constantly tested and stretched by Reinis Lismanis in Trial and Error. Lismanis’s experiments into photographic production provide unexpected outcomes, often through the exploration of the mechanics of the image and its apparatus. Comprising mediums of photography, printmaking, video, installation in a variety of approaches, Trial and Error focuses on the breakdown of photographic production with traditional processes and methods being reworked to innovative effect.
In Archival Pigment Prints Lismanis has sourced ‘empty’ ink cartridges from professional printing labs, extracted the remaining ink and (re)applied it to photographic paper. Translating the mechanical application of the printer head to the human hand, allows for chance and lack of control to take over. Elsewhere, redundant photographic equipment is adapted and morphed into new sculptural forms.
Lismanis treats the exhibition space as live laboratory with working evidence and results of his experiments on show. Displayed, on large coloramas, are snapshots from the artist’s everyday including research trips, production tests and documentation of ‘behind the scenes’ production.
The looped video work Calibration reworks extracted colours of a screen calibration process, providing a meditation on colour, art and science. In How to produce colours beautiful to the human eye, Lismanis presents a montage of instructional videos, collected from YouTube, demonstrating various photographic techniques and other processes. Lismanis uses digital tools and technologies to probe and dissect the cyclical nature of production providing questioning survey of photographic process, material and authorship.
