Karlīna Mežecka’s Stare Up At Me Finds Bodies Under Pressure

At the center of Karlīna Mežecka’s largest solo exhibition to date is a creature that refuses to settle into a single meaning.

It is a conjoined calf, enlarged and suspended above the viewer. It can appear vulnerable and monumental, devotional and unsettling, infantile and sacrificial. Its gaze does not simply meet the audience. It seems to hold the surrounding gallery in a state of prolonged attention.

That unstable encounter runs throughout Stare Up At Me / Veries manī, now on view at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga through August 9. Curated by Zane Onckule, the exhibition brings together newly created sculpture, ceramics, glass, metal, installation, photography, and sound across four interconnected chapters titled “Life,” “Death,” “Dominance,” and “Summary.”

Rather than presenting the body as a fixed or self-contained form, Mežecka approaches it as something under constant pressure. Surfaces swell, split, absorb, reflect, and threaten to rupture. Bodies appear caught between material presence and imagination, as though they are still deciding what they might become.

The result is an exhibition built around transition rather than resolution.

A Title Borrowed From Suspended Desire

The exhibition takes its title and part of its emotional logic from Madonna’s 2000 song “Don’t Tell Me.” In the song, romantic refusal and suspended desire are filtered through strange, almost surreal imagery: a bed becomes an open grave, while a kneeling calf seems to stare upward.

Mežecka carries that mixture of intimacy, dread, sensuality, and emotional stasis into the gallery.

The reference is not used as a nostalgic pop-cultural quotation. Instead, it becomes a structural undercurrent for an exhibition in which beds, animals, bodily fragments, devotional forms, and reflective surfaces repeatedly shift between comfort and threat.

A familiar domestic object can become a landscape. A vulnerable creature can take on the scale of a monument. Ceramic can resemble skin, mineral, bone, or something retrieved from the bottom of the sea.

Throughout the exhibition, looking is never entirely passive. The works look back.

Life as a Tidal Condition

The opening chapter, “Life,” begins with the bed.

Here, the bed is treated less as a piece of furniture than as a horizontal environment in which intimacy, exhaustion, sexuality, illness, confession, sleep, and silence accumulate. Exhibition materials describe it as a tidal condition—a basin in which bodily and psychological states gather, dissolve, and return.

Resting across this space is a loosely cast, whale-like sculpture that appears suspended between weight and buoyancy. Its mass suggests something washed ashore, partially submerged, or not yet fully separated from the surface supporting it.

The imagery avoids a straightforward narrative. There is no simple progression from one event to another. Instead, Mežecka creates an atmosphere of lingering pressure, in which emotional and material states overlap.

Water becomes especially important within this visual language.

The exhibition draws attention to forms of indirect representation that developed under Soviet-era censorship, when sexuality and physical intimacy could not always be shown openly. In film, photography, and literature, desire could instead appear through displaced images: rain moving across glass, bodies positioned near shorelines, submerged light, mist, weather, and reflection.

Such imagery allowed intimacy to remain visible while avoiding direct declaration.

In Stare Up At Me, water and reflective surfaces retain that sense of mediation. Desire is present, but it is refracted. The body is visible, but never entirely available.

Death Without Finality

From the horizontal world of “Life,” the exhibition moves into “Death,” although death here is not presented as a clean ending.

It becomes a process of redistribution and material transformation.

Ceramic works are positioned on a luminous structure that projects light upward from the floor. The display evokes reliquaries, archaeological fragments, deep-sea organisms, clinical presentation, and museum storage without settling fully into any of them.

The viewer looks downward, reversing the upward gaze demanded by the suspended calf elsewhere in the exhibition. Light passes across and through the works, weakening distinctions between ceramic, mineral, skin, and spectral presence.

These objects may resemble remains, but they do not appear inert. They suggest matter that is still active—continuing to alter, harden, erode, glow, or reorganize itself after the body associated with it has disappeared.

Mežecka’s approach resists the idea that death stabilizes meaning. Even remains can continue to change.

Ceramics That Breathe and Break

Although Mežecka trained in ceramics, her practice moves across materials and disciplines. She works with ceramics, molten glass, metal, installation, and sound, treating each medium as part of a larger system rather than as an isolated craft tradition.

A particularly significant element of her practice is a technique she developed in which molten glass is blown directly into handmade ceramic structures.

The process produces forms that appear to have expanded from within. Glass pushes against the ceramic as though breath, growth, heat, or intrusion has filled an internal cavity and forced the surrounding structure outward.

The resulting objects preserve the tension of their making. Ornament cannot be separated from rupture. Growth and damage appear on the same surface.

This relationship between containment and breach provides one of the exhibition’s strongest material ideas. A vessel is traditionally expected to hold something. Mežecka’s vessels seem shaped by the possibility that what they hold may exceed them.

The body operates in much the same way.

It contains breath, memory, illness, sexuality, fear, and physical matter, yet it is never entirely sealed. It leaks, absorbs, expands, heals, scars, and eventually breaks down. Mežecka’s sculptures make those internal pressures visible without attempting to explain them away.

ISCP, where Mežecka completed a New York residency in 2025, describes her interdisciplinary practice as one that uses ceramics, glass, and metal to expand the possibilities of ceramics through sculpture and installation.

The Calf Above the Viewer

The exhibition’s third chapter, “Dominance,” changes the physical relationship between object and audience.

The conjoined calf is raised above eye level, acquiring the height and authority of a monument. Yet its monumentality remains unstable. The creature does not appear triumphant. Its fragility remains visible even after it has been enlarged and elevated.

This contradiction prevents it from becoming a conventional symbol of power.

The calf carries associations of innocence, dependence, sacrifice, livestock, religious devotion, birth anomaly, and spectacle. Its joined body may suggest intimacy or entrapment. Its elevation may resemble worship, display, or punishment.

Its blank gaze becomes a surface onto which the viewer can project meaning, yet the sculpture never confirms any one interpretation.

It is both object and observer.

The title Stare Up At Me initially appears to describe the audience’s physical position beneath the sculpture. Over time, however, the direction of the gaze becomes less certain. The viewer looks upward, but the calf also appears to stare downward. Each becomes implicated in the act of looking at the other.

Dominance, in this context, is not simply possession or control. It is a negotiation over who is allowed to look, who becomes visible, and who is transformed into an object.

A Gallery Held Within One Sound

The exhibition’s four chapters are connected by a continuous three-part sound composition created by Aleksejs Apolskis, also known through the projects VoidCells and Spoild.

Dark ambient tones move slowly through the galleries, interrupted by water impacts and the sounds of glass and metal breaking. Rather than supplying a soundtrack to individual works, the composition establishes a shared atmospheric field.

The rooms begin to feel as though they exist inside the same weather system.

Sound changes the viewer’s experience of duration. Time does not advance neatly from “Life” to “Death” and onward to “Dominance.” It thickens. The chapters remain distinct, yet their emotional and material states continue to bleed into one another.

A breaking sound might suggest accident, violence, manufacturing, or release. Water may evoke cleansing, flooding, submersion, birth, or erosion.

As with the sculptures, meaning remains in motion.

What Remains in the Final Room

The concluding chapter, “Summary,” does not attempt to resolve the exhibition’s tensions.

Vitrines collect photographic fragments, bodily studies, skeletal forms, traces of physical encounters, and sculptural remnants into a quieter constellation. These images and objects resemble evidence, archives, or specimens, yet they resist becoming a definitive record.

They feel less like an answer than an accumulation.

Across the exhibition, bodies move between animality and sanctity, sensuality and estrangement, sleep and extinction. The final room does not stop that movement. It gathers its residues and allows the possibility of further transformation to remain open.

For Mežecka, the body is not a stable boundary separating interior from exterior. It is a temporary arrangement of materials, desires, pressures, memories, and imagined states.

In Stare Up At Me, even the hardest surfaces seem capable of swelling. Even monuments remain fragile. Even death leaves matter unfinished.

A Latvian Practice Moving Internationally

Born in Riga in 1995, Mežecka has lived and worked in London since 2021. She completed a bachelor’s degree in ceramics at the Art Academy of Latvia before earning a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in London.

Her recent exhibitions include Archive of Fragility at Kim? in 2024, Security Patterns at Low Gallery in Riga, and group presentations in London and New York. She received the 2025 Kim? Residency Award and completed a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn later that year. Her work has entered institutional and private collections in Latvia and internationally.

That movement between Riga, London, and New York situates Mežecka within an increasingly international generation of Baltic artists whose practices are shaped by local histories without being confined by them.

The Soviet visual codes referenced in Stare Up At Me remain culturally specific, but the larger questions travel easily.

How does desire appear when it cannot speak directly? What happens when the body exceeds the structure intended to contain it? When does vulnerability become spectacle? Can something fragile ever become a monument without losing the evidence of its fragility?

Mežecka does not provide fixed answers.

She creates forms that continue to stare, swell, fracture, and wait.

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