Artist statement

Photography is my primary medium but not my limit. I like to compile and create new tools and techniques using earlier invented and verified ones. Among the techniques applied are monocle (single-element lens) shooting, photograms, combining graphics and photos, mockumentary, the author's method of creating a light collage, digital appliqué, work in the sci-fi and mockumentary genres. For me, the exhibition space is a way to expand opportunities for photos hanging on the wall. I add dimension and layering to projects, using other media such as text, sound, video, performances, sculptures. Each project is a new way of presentation, such as the total installation of texts for the Came from the Sea project or the idea of exhibiting the principle of Darwin’s stratigraphic records’ incompleteness on stands with “gaps.”

In the course of work, I chose to apply modern techniques and equipment: shooting with a phone, digital camera, inkjet printing etc. Except for projects where archaic methods match the conceptual idea.

Curiosity is my main driving force, and experimenting provides an opportunity to feed my curiosity. My current range of interests involves science, or to be more exact, evolution. I have chosen this theme because any object in the Universe, living or inanimate, at any moment in time is only in a transitional form. Any existing object develops, including organisms, landscapes, and social relationships. It means that issues that need research never run short. The only difficulty with fixing it is the process duration. However, repeated observations can help. Such as shooting the plant or the snow many times in the same place. And the ability to see hidden or insignificant signs of future changes, for example, changes in climate that nature fouded billions of years ago are still an unalterable law.

Time is a key factor in evolution and for me, this is a mystical phenomenon, because time and photography are closely related: exposure time, time as an epoch, curvature of the past-present-future sequence, projection on paper of the moments that will never happen again, materialization of light flow that creates the illusion that you have captured a moment of life. Meanwhile, time remains unknown from a physics point of view, and this creates more questions for me than answers.

In my first project City of my Childhood, which gave rise to my artistic career, I literally cut out part of time from the mould of my memories. In the project To Live Ten Lives, the research takes place over a long period and shows changes both in plant morphology and in our perception. In the Came from the Sea project, the primary focus is on a long stretch of time where one can study the principles of global changes and evolution.

I stick to a new paradigm of relations between human and nature, where human is not superior to the surrounding world. Where a living creature possesses the ability to think. And for me, it is very important to find a way to transform people’s attitude to Another Form of Consciousness and possible means of communication.