When the letters didn't become text
This is a project at the intersection of contemporary art and minimalist poetry, which includes the artist's books, visual poetry, works based on poetic texts, as well as works containing text or its elements. In it, I consider different options for the interaction of text and image, as well as different situations of the existence of text in the territory of contemporary art.
This project consists of canvases depicting a QR code generated from my short poems. Since the surface of each canvas is completely covered with ornaments, the grapheme of the code is distorted, and it becomes impossible to read it. Thus, we get a double encoding, where the ornament acts as an encoding tool. But in order for the secret message to be read, the one-liners are included in the names of the canvases. As a result, we have a series of self-contained works, the name of which means exactly what is depicted on them. The QR code in this project loses its informational function, turning into an ornamental structure.In this way, he repeats the fate of ancient ornaments that have lost their semantic meaning over time.
The series consists of 10 embroideries based on author's poems. Each letter has been replaced with a cross, the basic unit of the embroidery "language". Thus, the transfer of the artistic text to the territory of visual art is carried out. This work talks about the difficulties of communication: "speaking" and understanding. If we consider it in a narrower, lyrical sense, then the essence of the statement can be expressed by the phrase "everyone is silent about his own," implying something very personal that lies deep in his heart and is kept secret. The language of embroidery becomes a secret language, a cipher to which there is no key.
Graphic sheets in which letters are endowed with their own will. They act as living beings capable of arguing with the author, unwilling to follow a certain order. They change their shape, location, and voluntarily leave their assigned places.
The series consists of 17 graphic sheets and is an exhibition version of an absurdist book, where the illustrations are abstract, and the poetic lines are supplemented using the T9 function.
"The child is falling asleep. The fire falls asleep. The water falls asleep. The moon is falling asleep. The river falls asleep. The mountain falls asleep. The earth is falling asleep. The grass is falling asleep. The raccoon falls asleep. The fox falls asleep. The sheep falls asleep. And the bull falls asleep. Granite falls asleep. Amber falls asleep. The oats fall asleep. And the hops fall asleep. The pier is falling asleep. The ship is falling asleep. The harpoon falls asleep. And the network goes to sleep. The factory is falling asleep. The machine falls asleep. And the steam falls asleep. And the smoke falls asleep."
This block includes a series of works based on the use of words and phrases. Sometimes they are absurd, sometimes they are quite banal. Some are poetic, and some are quite real. When creating these works, I was interested in the game that forms at the junction between their form and content - an image that represents a text indicating an existing or non-existent sound or smell.
I'm going on a mysterious journey. I'll be a little salamander and a red deer. I'll be a glare on the water and a fishing boatI'll be copper and ivoryI'll be a red fox and a sleeping volcano. I'll be a cloud and a patchwork quilt. I'll be the woman at the spring and the little round stone. I'll be a flowering bush and a cold stone. I'll be a mountain road and a bird's feather. I'll be a wild dog and a weedI'll be a broken branch and a thunderclap. I'll be a bowl with a chipped edge and an echo over a mountain lake. I will be the sunshine and the quiet river. I'll be a silver fish and a withered tree. I will be the drops from the roof and the distant lights of the citiesI'll be a seagull and a crab. And a shell on the shore
In this graphic series, I tried to create a complete visual and poetic image by applying a random pattern of threads to the text of the poem, thereby making it difficult to read. The phrases seem to be hiding behind an abstract thread "web", some are barely visible. One-liners can be read individually or combined into one long poem, where each line begins with the same words.: "I do not know..." This series is an exhibition version of the artist's book of the same name.
The series of 4 graphic sheets "Output" refers to the poem of the same name by Alain Bosquet, however, it is not his illustration. In these works, letters, like living beings, refuse to do their job - they don't add up to words. They form their own order and disorder. Instead of denoting sound, they become elements of an abstract graphic composition, like dots or spots.
This series consists of 19 graphic sheets and is a concretistic poem based on repetitions, where the author lists poetic variants of the existence of branches. We see an absurdist book taken apart, containing a poetic text presented in one line, and an illustration that loses its function because it repeats itself unchanged on each page and does not reflect the changes in the text in any way.