1st Place: Mellow Apocalypse by Alnis Stakle

I am interested in the fate of canonised artistic, scientific and journalistic images and their potential to embody contemporary meanings. For my collages, I have used images from the open source collections at art museums, scientific institutions and image banks, whose archives may be considered iconic testimonies of the present and the past. The collages are grounded in my search for syntactic visual language connections pertaining to various periods, media and domains of visual culture. The collages make use of the ideas and technical codes established in visual communication that transcend the borderlines of ages, media and cultures:the codes that are so deeply ingrained in culture that they are used without thinking, and are understood through pre-existing schemas in the recipients minds.