Planning and installing five bodies of work in two spacious rooms in Nancy’s gallery in Shanghai was a challenge as well as a lot of fun. It required accommodating large-scale works within the intricacy of the rooms’ layout and accounting for the balance between black-and-white and color works.
Metaphores at Galerie Cezar, Arles, France
I thought about what to show in Arles for a year when the world was breaking apart and the countries were colliding and decided on a black-and-white aesthetic of three series Rayoinism, A Light Divine, and Hamsa which share a common underlying thesis to present conscious and unconscious interactions and symbols expressed in these works.
Rayonism loosely uses the groundbreaking power of the light idea of the namesake early twentieth-century avant-garde art movement. A particular high-contrast B&W film facilitates the abstraction of visual properties of existing objects into a mixture of light and geometry.
A Light Divine explores the unconscious and the conscious in our lives. Communication from one to another carries on through nonverbal means: our intuitive feelings, emotions, vision flashes, and dreams. A registration of instances of this communication happens instinctively when consciousness interprets the unconscious messages and forces us to act upon them without question. It is an acknowledgment of nonverbal communication, a light divine.
Hamsa addresses our relationship with objects when we usually don’t consciously assign any significance to them. Four utilitarian objects were chosen and arranged to represent a meta-object of a higher hierarchy conceived by the human psyche. Three of them carry particular symbolism: a fig is a symbol of a tree of life, a lemon is a symbol of a heart, and a knife is a symbol of transience. These three elements are metaphorically employed to represent an eye in the palm - a prehistoric symbol of protection known as Hamsa.
Exhibition opening on Nov 6th, 2021. Video produced by NapoliVillage.com
Installation of the 'Migrating Mind' show
A large-scale site-specific installation at the Napoli Afragola Station is completed. The installation works organically with a unique Zaha Hadid Architects design and incorporates the functionality of the space. The exhibition opens on November 6th, 2021 and will last until the end of February 2022.
Black and White Works at a private salon
It’s my pleasure to show few series of my early work ‘A Light Devine’, ‘Hamsa’, and ‘Rayonism’ at a private reception in Palo Alto. Thank you for attending the show!
Press coverage of 'Migrating Mind' at Afragola Railway station.
Napolii Village news outlet in Naples, Italy has covered an upcoming show at Zaha Hadid’s designed railway station. This is a site specific installation consisting of several series.
'Desideratum' at the Orange Country Center for Contemporary Art
Desideratum II, 2016
Time flies… A year ago, actually even more than that, in September of 2019 the show started taking its shape and was planned to be exhibited in May of 2020. Little did we know what was coming…
So here we are, after all ups and downs of the pandemic, uncertainty and ingenuity of dealing with a new normal of lockdowns, hopes and expectations, the show is on. And as added bonus, it will be open to the general public without prior appointments. It seems unusual, yet refreshing to be back to the pre-pandemic sense of granted lifestyle.
In addition to presenting ‘Desideratum’ for the first time, there will be also a selection of works from ‘Transience’ and ‘Salve’ series.
Here is a full press release as well as a link to the art center’s information.
Interview to 'Chinese Photographers' magazine
Deconstruction of the Conceptual Art an interview by Yiwei Lu was published in the February 2021 issue of ‘Chinese Photographers’ magazine, a leading publication of the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Chinese Academy of Arts.
Artist talk at Fabrik Projects Gallery
Discussing series ‘Meditation On a Tree’ with Fabrik Projects Gallery Chris Davies at the inaugural exhibit of its 3D Virtual Viewing Experience
'Departure and Arrival' is in 'Time' - an anthology curated by Cynthia Penna
Cynthia Penna, Peter Frank, Todd Williamson, and Yuri Boyko are pleased to invite you to a panel discussion of ‘Time’ – an anthology of works by international artists reflecting on their relationship with time during the pandemic.
It consists of writings, drawings, paintings, photographs, and video stills by ninety-three artists and art curators from around the globe. The goal of this project is to take an immediate slice of time and present it ‘as is’, or as an ‘Unmodified History’ footprint of the spring of 2020. This multiview snapshot of the human physical isolation is our attempt to preserve it as a legacy for future generations.
The panel took place on Zoom on Tuesday, May 26th in a format of a dialog between panelists and the audience. All profits from the book sale will be donated to a hospital charity or other institution for scientific research to make our future safer.
'Stages' on View in the Neighborhood
I felt it is a timely look back to the prior crisis that we went through.
A narrative is a series of stages. The first stage is one of vigor, success, and unquestioned well being. This is followed by the devastation of blurry red and clear pierced black images before the time of healing. The latter is eternal - constant reevaluation of the self leads to a rediscovery and new levels of understanding. The final images of healing come from the 11th century handwritten manuscript of Cyrillic text from Kyiv Rus where a single letter, depicted in the final picture, corresponds to the eternal 'self'.
'Migrating Mind' Installation at Zaha Hadid's Railway Station in Naples
This interview with curator Cynthia Penna of Art1307 was recorded and produced while Stay-at-Home order put everybody’s mind into the quarantine mode. An excerpt from a conceptual theme for the show:
The Voice of Left Behind is a voice of reason. It knows the past, lives in the present and cautions about the future.
The Voice of Transition is a voice of intuition and uncertainty, it speaks in dreams and desires. It lives in present and pushes into the future.
Interview with Bastille.tv
It so happened that a man walked into my show at the gallery in Arles this summer, unhurriedly looked at my work, and stroke a casual conversation. He had rather an unorthodox way of dressing up. A black knitted bell shaped tunic ending below the knees, black knitted sailor like brimless cap and black Converse low-tops. He commanded an attention. His name was Wilson Balda. After few days of conversation about art and culture, while seeping coffee in a town bustling with activity around Les Rencontres d’Arles, he casually dropped an invitation to host me in his internet based TV channel next time I’m in Paris. Well, the timing was perfect I was planning to attend the Fotofever art fair in November.
Please join me in a live broadcast from Corcoran’s Irish Pub Les Lilas on October 28th. It will be a lot of fun!
'Immersive Identity' in Paris, France
This year I’m bringing selected works from Immersive Identity series to Fotofever art fair in Paris. This will be the first time .when part of the series featuring Jungian archetypes wil be shown in Europe.
Stop by the Fabrik Projects gallery in the fair’s main hall. The fair runs Nov 8-10 at the Carrousel du Louvre. VIP preview is on Nov 7th at 5 PM.
Interview with Voyage LA: Hollywood's Thought Provokers →
Nobody lived there. The place was inhabited by all kinds of domestic animals: ducks, chicken, cats, turkeys, rabbits, sheep, donkey, two horses, and even two peacocks. Once a day in the evening a care-taker would drive in to feed and pick up customary eggs of different shapes and colors. He would swing estate’s main gate wide open and have all animals freely go out for pasture. At dusk, he would whistle, and animals would return one by one.
Read More'Salve' is in Full Blede, Issue Seven: The Continuant
When I was preparing for an art fair in Carrousel du Louvre, Paris in November of 2018 I thought about creating support material by transferring all five images of this series into a newspaper format. There were obvious benefits like portability of medium and enhancing the experience by incorporating printed word, as well as challenges of image presentation.
All these considerations were off when Sacha Baumann, a publisher of the broadsheet Full Blede, invited me to participate in The Continuant issue of the publication. It was simply a different experience altogether: it was a publication of contemporary writing and art as a tangible object of a thoughtful curation of artists’ views on specific topic. Why an object ? May be due to its almost forgotten tactile sense of turning a newspaper page and dropping it on a table or folding it in-half after last page is over.
Solo Show Opening @Fabrik Projects Gallery →
It takes a leap of faith to go from a large scale images envisioned jn my mind to physical objects of archival pigment prints placed within the gallery space. Seeing them born out of a dark room litho developer on a thin 4x5 long forgotten ortho Kodak film, transferred into a digital realm of contemporary post production, layered with deep blacks on heavy weight Hahnemuhle paper, and, finally, claim existence on their own terms in the public space of a gallery.
It's a quiet moment when the installation is completed and before the crowd pours in.... For now they are alone for the night in their innocence before facing the hail of judgment.
Angel of Vatopedi
In my search of the source material, I was traveling through the sites where it would be the most probable to experience the reverse perspective not only as a mind play but also, if possible, to see it in a real-life utilitarian context, for example as a part of an architectural composition. In other words, how a visual plane that employs the reverse perspective is perceived when it is readily available and is outside of a museum environment.
Like a fresco that reflects the early morning sun shining on those laboring up the steep steps day in and day out.
Reverse perspective
An issue of the reverse perspective is debated among art historians on a question of whether it was intentional or due to the insufficient knowledge at the time. Roughly up to 15th century before Italian Renaissance laid down theoretical foundation for the linear perspective, the depiction of subject matter on two dimensional plane often was diverging away from a viewer rather than converging into a distant point as it is common now. Images of Byzantine school of iconography represent this kind of perspective (e.g. a detail from an unidentified icon on the left).
In 2012, while in Moscow, I took this image as a response to a book on reverse perspective without planning or thinking about any specific project but rather reflecting on a different point of representation. Now, when I'm developing a body of work where a philosophic idea of experiencing the world by a human is centered inside of an observer rather than on an outside, I want to share my creative process in a series of postings.