04.07.–23.08.2026 The exhibition is open to visitors free of charge during the museum’s opening hours.
From 4 July, Zuzeum Greenhouse will present “our hands meet, please stay”, an exhibition created especially for the space by US-based artists Gints Virgilijs Tilks and Jamieson Edson. The exhibition brings together the artists’ distinct yet dialogic practices – Tilks’s monumental spatial structures and Edson’s images created through analogue photography – exploring the liminal states of closeness, distance, and touch.
In collaboration, Jamieson Edson and Virgilijs Tilks move through the space between closeness and distance, beginning with the charged possibility of connection and the hesitation that often accompanies it. The desire to reach toward another person is met by an equally strong instinct to preserve one’s own boundaries.
The work emerges from this tension, exploring how intimacy can be both an act of approach and a form of resistance. Coming from different visual and cultural backgrounds, artists bring distinct sensibilities into dialogue. One practice leans toward structure, weight, and architectural form; the other toward photography, fleeting gestures, and emotional immediacy. Rather than dissolving these differences, artists allow them to remain visible, shaping the work through exchange, friction, and mutual transformation.
Throughout the installation, images of hands, touch, and suspended gestures appear as recurring traces of contact—moments that feel both intimate and uncertain, as if they are about to happen or have already slipped away. Materials behave in similar ways. Modular structures can assemble into larger environments or separate into individual forms. Laser-engraved textiles, layered plywood panels, exposed bolts, and fragmented surfaces function both as connectors and as barriers, holding together what also threatens to come apart.
“We are interested in how objects can carry emotional memory, how physical forms can hold vulnerability, and how perception itself can blur at the threshold between self and other. The work invites viewers into this unsettled space, where intimacy is never fixed and where meaning shifts through proximity, attention, and repeated encounter. Like touch itself, the installation asks what it means to meet something while still remaining distinct from it.“
About the artists
Jamieson Edson is an American-born artist currently based in Boston, US. In 2015, they received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the Studio for Interrelated Media department. Working primarily with analog photography, Jamieson creates emotionally resonant portraits of close friends, loved ones, and chance encounters. Their work has been exhibited in galleries and academic institutions throughout the New England region, and was recently acquired into the collection of Simmons University.
Through a range of photographic and printmaking techniques, Jamieson transforms analog images into more abstract representations, intentionally blurring the boundaries between physical form, memory, and perception. Their creative process turns everyday moments into layered expressions of emotion and experience, where personal intimacy merges with a broader sense of vulnerability. The works often function as intimate dedications to people, relationships, and fleeting moments, preserving their presence through the materiality of the image.
Virgilijs Tilks graduated in 2023 from the Visual Communication Department at Art Academy of Latvia. During his studies, he participated in an exchange program at Berlin University of the Arts, focusing on exhibition design. Alongside his studies, he worked as a gallery assistant at LOW Gallery and co-founded DOM Gallery, where he began developing his curatorial practice.
After graduating, he relocated to Boston, where he has actively participated in the local art scene. In 2024, alongside several group exhibitions in Boston, he presented his first solo exhibition at in Salem, Massachusetts. In 2025, he curated the exhibition In the Shadow of the Floater at Distillery Gallery, bringing together artists from multiple continents.
Virgilijs primarily works with sculptural elements, photography, and digital media to create narratives where physical and digital spaces intersect. His background in architecture, photography, and visual communication has shaped an interdisciplinary approach that explores how spatial relationships and visual elements can merge into dynamic, multidimensional experiences. He is particularly interested in the threshold where tactile materiality and digital perception meet.
Artwork: Jamieson Edson. Alejandro’s hand in mine, 2024.
