Emilija Škarnulytė makes work on the borders—between documentary and fiction, the political and the poetic, sculpture and digital art—and of her own body. In her short film Sirenomelia (2017), for example, she takes the form of a siren or mermaid and swims through an abandoned NATO submarine base in Norway, while other works explore oceans of data and a rumored spacecraft at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. This month, she opens Æqualia, an installation at New York City’s Canal Projects, which installs a breathtaking single-channel video of the artist swimming through the birth of the Amazon River upon reflective black flooring studded with sculptures of black glass she calls “Mermaid’s tears.”

Škarnulytė sat down with Surface ahead of the opening to talk about shape-shifting and subsurface tension.

How do you conceptualize your work?

I’m a Lithuanian-born artist, and as an experimental filmmaker I’ll often collaborate with researchers in fields of geology, marine biology, astrophysics, and quantum physics. I need that feedback, questioning, and the research-based process. Maybe we don’t see it in the works, but the challenging dialog is helpful in the mediums of video sculpture and sound-immersive spaces. For the last 12 years, I’ve been taking this into different themes: cosmic supernovas, dying black hole sounds, radioactivity, or descending to oceans in four time zones deprived of oxygen and light. I’ve been looking for what’s invisible to the naked eye, intangible, untouchable.

And rivers?

Yes, coming back to rivers as networks—this mapping of rivers being transport and also places where culture rises, of worshiping the river and paying respect to it. It’s based on Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and her book The Language of the Goddess. These riverian cultures were matriarchal, peaceful, and female, not the constant extraction of linear progress.

Æqualia is the video piece commissioned by Canal Projects and the 14th Gwangju Biennale. We’re weaving the confluence between two rivers—the Rio Negro and Rio Solimões—and my body. As in previous work, I’m working with hero mythology and shape-shifting. On this site [Encontro das Águas in Manaus, Brazil], the viscosity and velocity of these two bodies of water meet, but they don’t mix for six kilometers. They form fractals and swirls. I’m interested in these portals that exist between the world we see, the Newtonian real, and the quantum hidden. How to enter and create these portals?

Good question!

The Rio Solimões is made of glacier melt from the Andes. It’s full of sediments—one geological period. The Rio Negro is of the rain forests, full of rotten lowland matter. I’m orientating along the line, through temperature. This site is the birth of one of the world’s biggest rivers, the Amazon, and is full of mythology of shape-shifting, conflict, pollution, and tensions. I was filming from 2020 to 2023, and by last October the rivers were in an extended drought. There was a mass dying of botos, the pink river dolphins. We were swimming together here. I was thinking of the figure as a non-gendered species that adapted—not a mermaid, but maybe a dolphin or a watersnake. It’s referring to those Goddesses from paleolithic and neolithic times. So the work is already looking from a future geologist’s perspective. It was exhausting.

Yes, what was the actual filming like?

It was a small production: me, a drone operator, and a boat pilot. I was far from the boat so it didn’t get in the shot. The Rio Negro was almost boiling. More shallow, and full of this… life.

How do you relate this new work to your previous films?

In 2015, I trained in Norway, in a free-diving technique. It’s about mythological characters’ point of view, not just a documentary. In the footage, pink river dolphins were following, surrounding me. I feel this urge, this intuition. Once I enter that portal, I’m outside my comfort zone. I tend to do that in all my works. I filmed Burial, my last film, for seven years in nuclear decommissioned sites. In that non-comfort zone, that subsurface tension, something happens. It’s shape-shifting, traveling in a circle of time. I always try to transmit that, in live exhibition architecture. It’s never a screen or a monitor—it’s a space that surrounds us, where we could be our own bodies.

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This February, the Surface team will handpick a selection of elevated objects of affection for our exclusive Valentine’s Day Gift Guide. Expect a mix of sophisticated curiosities, housewares, fine art prints, and other covetable gifts that reimagine the holiday with a highbrow slant and represent worthwhile purchases that your Valentine will truly treasure.

With its legendary architecture by Herbert Beyer, Aspen is among the world’s great hubs of Bauhaus design—an under-heralded legacy Post Company looks to revive with its new Mollie Aspen hotel, an homage to the town’s resident talent. The building’s rectangular form lends a touch of rationality to Main Street, as its two-story, wood-clad facade condenses into a single story on its west axis, scaled to greet the neighboring Victorian homes. The rocky Elk Mountains and Maroon Bells that rise around the 68-key stay find reference inside, lending its hue to the rock used throughout, complimenting the brick and sustainably harvested Radiata pine siding they laid vertically and in random widths.

Post Company looked to the work of another Bauhaus legend, Anni Albers, as inspiration for the branding and graphics; her influence might also be felt in the large-scale textile piece by Rachel Snack that defines the lobby. Mollie’s solar array keeps each room feel welcoming via energy-efficient heat pumps. Guests seeking solar power of their own might sun themselves on the rooftop pool and terrace, both with unobstructed 180-degree views of Aspen mountain, before refueling with a Mollie Old Fashioned and Niman Ranch strip steak at the restaurant MOLLIE, the latest offering from Death & Co.’s group Gin & Luck.

Last year, Piaule Homeware founders Nolan McHugh and Trevor Briggs, along with Garrison Architects, planted some two dozen cabins on stilts across 50 acres near the town of Catskill. With their floor-to-ceiling glass walls and minimalist palette of timber and stone—and the raw cedar spa with sauna, steam room, and salt-water and cold plunge pools—Piaule Catskill is an upstate expression of Scandinavian-inspired minimalism.

That’s why their newest collaboration makes so much sense: Fritz Hansen has selected the destination to install their first outdoor range, the Skagerak Collection, including ample guest seating made with FSC and PEFC certified wood. “The thoughtful design of the landscape not only serves as the perfect backdrop for this collection,” says Chris Paulsen, vice president of Americas at Fritz Hansen, “but also evokes a deeper narrative about our connection to nature and respect for the environment.” Each piece, including the lounges lined up just beyond the cedar lounge, will gradually attain a silvery hue as the upstate elements weather them.

Publishing behemoths may be at a tipping point, but last week, Jupiter, a new independent arts and culture magazine, burst onto New York City’s literary scene. Its founders and co-editors, Camille Gallogly Bacon and Daria Simone Harper, shared with guests their bold vision for a publication that rights industry wrongs of low pay and unsustainable output while shifting the art world’s publishing paradigms. Friends, family, and writers for Jupiter’s debut issue joined the founding editors for dinner at Lula Mae, a staple for Cambodian fare in Clinton Hill, followed by a dance party DJ’d by Amarie Gipson.

When was it? Jan. 18

Where was it? Lula Mae, Brooklyn

Who was there? Jenna Wortham, Kennedy Yanko, Diallo Simon-Ponte, Turiya Adkins, and Rianna Jade Parker.

When: Until April 5

Where: Twentieth Gallery, Los Angeles

What: Blackburn combines wisdom she’s gleaned from a career of more than 30 years in the arts, including UCLA’s architecture department and MoCA LA, with skill from her training as a painter. The works on view in her current exhibition reflect influences from architecture, nature, painting, and a desire to challenge notions of tradition in the ceramics discipline. The artist takes cues from contemporary painting to inform the works’ textural surfaces and glazing, while nods to architecture are present in the vessels’ shapes and forms.

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Tyler Ellis, the daughter of revered fashion designer Perry Ellis, channels her fascination for traveling into an endless current of inspiration. Her accessories line is defined by luxe materials and thoughtful details that embody her worldly palette. Brought to life in a family-owned and operated atelier in Le Sieci, Italy, Tyler Ellis represents an ardent commitment to couture and quality craftsmanship.

Surface Says: Thanks to their sleek silhouettes, Italian hand-craftsmanship, and Ellis’s own keen eye, these expertly made handbags are well-poised to become a new classic in the competitive accessories space.

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