Olesya Ilenok
«Changes in Contemplation»
«Changes in Contemplation»
December 24, 2020 - March 28, 2021
The Sensual Experience of the City
The fourth season of the Metenkov House residency program continues with an exhibition by Olesya Ilenok. The project of the Ural artist addresses the theme of human interaction with the world around him and asks the viewer the question: Are you a stranger to the place in which you live?
The everyday triangle «Home-Work-Supermarket» hangs over the inhabitant of the modern metropolis. Confining ourselves to a minimum number of familiar places, we begin to perceive the space around us as an optional scenery, and the movement between locations - a forced necessity. Communication with everyday reality turns into a rare hobby. The project suggests approaching the city from an active explorer's position and appeals to the practice of a psychogeographic drift (a term introduced by Guy Debord) - a conscious admiration of the surroundings and enjoyment of randomness.
The everyday triangle «Home-Work-Supermarket» hangs over the inhabitant of the modern metropolis. Confining ourselves to a minimum number of familiar places, we begin to perceive the space around us as an optional scenery, and the movement between locations - a forced necessity. Communication with everyday reality turns into a rare hobby. The project suggests approaching the city from an active explorer's position and appeals to the practice of a psychogeographic drift (a term introduced by Guy Debord) - a conscious admiration of the surroundings and enjoyment of randomness.
Subjective data in the form of impressions of the body of the city were collected using clay blanks while drifting through Yekaterinburg. The resulting casts, intuitively bearing the flair of ancient fossils and cave paintings, recorded recognizable forms and ornaments of reality. Subsequently, they were subjected to algorithmic analysis and sonification. The texture of the clay was turned into spectrograms to play sound in the Max MSP program, which allowed the combination of traditional material and digital technology.
The project does not indicate the exact location of the creation of each clay blank, which absorbed grains of reality. The coordinates are hidden behind visual, tactile, and auditory elements that, like spots in a Rorschach test, trigger a flow of associations and invite the viewer to a prolonged search that goes far beyond the exhibition space. The viewer can expand the spectrum of perception of the city by looking, touching, and listening to the exhibit.
Events
Vernissage
December 24 | thursday| 19:00 | admission by invitation and tickets to the museum
December 24 | thursday| 19:00 | admission by invitation and tickets to the museum
Olesya Ilenok
Olesya Ilenok is an interdisciplinary artist who studies urban environments, using analog and digital tools in her work. She works in various media: generative art, sound, dynamic lighting, clay sculpture, photography, collage, stencil graffiti, and video. Ilenok has been shortlisted for the Sergey Kuryokhin Award for Best Public Art Project (for He Said, "We're There!", 2018, as part of the collective 4ZH) and won the Art of Neuroscience competition (The Netherlands, 2019; with the project AF:CFFiIV, created as part of the collective pt9). Her residencies include New Stories of Yekaterinburg (Metenkov House, Yekaterinburg) and the Virtual St. Petersburg Art Residency (supported by the European Union National Institutes for Culture).
She has shown work at group shows at the National Center for Contemporary Arts Ural Branch (Yekaterinburg), the Yeltsin Center (Yekaterinburg), the Electromuseum (Moscow), Zarya Center for Contemporary Art (Vladivostok), and Artservatory Center of Contemporary Art (Khabarovsk).
She has shown work at group shows at the National Center for Contemporary Arts Ural Branch (Yekaterinburg), the Yeltsin Center (Yekaterinburg), the Electromuseum (Moscow), Zarya Center for Contemporary Art (Vladivostok), and Artservatory Center of Contemporary Art (Khabarovsk).