Six Meters Underground – Dainius Sciuka

A solo exhibition from the Point and Shoot Stories project, featuring photographs from a decade-long archive selected by the artist with both photographer and curator's eye. About It was an uncomfortable conversation with myself that lasted several years. The inner critic kept whispering: "You are still too young to dive into old work. Pack your things, go and shoot again." After a creative pause, opening the photo archive felt like a kind of defeat: if you show what is old, it means you have nothing new. At first I hoped to find the time, to leave and to make a completely new travel series for this project, which has been growing for more than a decade. But my greatest adventure of recent years was not discovering the world. It was building a gallery. This summer I opened the archive to review the frames, select them and scan them. The negative evaporated at once; what came back instead were the memories of every frame and one question: who was I when I pressed the shutter? The person who took these pictures five and ten years ago did not know that he would look at them so changed. Or that the same gaze searching for forms and light would grow beyond photography: into space, interiors and finally a gallery. The first journeys surfaced clearly in my memory, and the first point and shoot, an Olympus mju-1 bought from a classified ad for fifteen litas. Later, after discovering the scandalous photographs of Terry Richardson, the point and shoot aesthetic fundamentally changed how I see. The Yashica T4 became an inseparable part of me: I never let it out of my hands, trying to build the habit of seeing a frame wherever I am. I could sit for hours and simply watch the light, and when the right moment came, press the shutter in time. That is how a decade began in which I travelled like a cowboy on the prairie with a Yashica clipped to my belt. From a small Lithuanian town to Peru, Morocco, South Africa and California. I travelled alone, mostly without a plan, hungry for adventure. I took in the beauty of the world, its forms, compositions and characters, and I needed nothing more. The photographs in this exhibition are visual cuttings from a ten year archive, selected not only with the eye of a photographer but also with the eye of a curator. The pictures that now stir deep reflection and nostalgia in me lay bare, clearly and sharply, the difference between the young traveller then and the mature photographer now. It is precisely this distance between two people, both of whom are me, that inspired this exhibition. Read more Toggle Photography