Reinis Lismanis (1992) is a Latvian artist living and working in London, UK. In late 2017, Lismanis held his first solo exhibition, Trial and Error, at the Arsenāls Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art. Since 2012, Lismanis has taken part in group shows worldwide. His upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the Niagara Falls Project Space in Brighton, UK, and a group exhibition at TSS Gallery in London, UK. In 2019, the artist will publish two artist books – T6031_T6061_T8001 (NoRoutineBooks) and Trial and Error (Skinnerboox).
For the past several years, Lismanis has been exploring photographic production and the traditional systems that lie behind the scenes of its processes and methods. In a self-reflective manner, his work both acknowledges and challenges the conventional structures behind image making, exhibition display systems and artistic production in general. Systems theory and black box thinking provide the basis for his interest in the dismantling of a subject into elements that form the whole. The importance of this process-focused and rhizomatic approach is that it can broaden horizons of thinking about photography. A new and currently ongoing body of work Second-Hand Ideas takes its title from E. M. Forster’s science fiction story The Machine Stops. The work uses basic elements of image production (inkjet paper, pigment ink printer calibration and test prints, aluminium panels, etc.), reusing and recycling these into new collages. Though visually abstract, these works focus on layers of information alternative to conventional photography.
