User Experience
(AV17 Gallery), Vilnius, Lithuania, 2024
photo: Laima Milkintė

In the solo exhibition “User Experience”, Maciej Gabka presents his latest works – reliefs and sculptures – that illustrate the relationship between humans and objects as it arises through their physical interaction. The title is associated with the term “user experience” (UX), which describes the overall feelings and impressions that a person encounters when interacting with everyday products, services, or systems. It encompasses not only functionality and ease of use but also emotional, aesthetic, and contextual aspects. Each artwork is accompanied by commentary based on scientic research, discussing and legitimizing specic standards and explaining representations of normative behavior. The exhibition depicts our everyday lives, where any behavior that is considered outside the norm is noticed and has consequences. The objects in the exhibition reveal how we adhere to established rules and perceive the world through normative lters, allowing viewers to make connections between the works in the exhibition and their own personal everyday experiences. The artist’s role here becomes similar to that of a designer, who constructs the forms of ordinary objects on the basis of statistics and observations of visual culture. Meanwhile, the aim of “User Experience” becomes to ensure that the interaction between the human and the product, in this case, the viewer, is intuitive and eective, thereby increasing user engagement.