|
|||||
| Artists | Exhibitions | News | Contacts | The Press | |
|
|||||
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Dmitry Kawarga |
|
Dmitry Kawarga was born, lives and works in Moscow, Russia. Graduated from Art and Theatre College. A member of International Federation of Artist & national Artist's Union of Russia since 1996. 1999 – began his work in 3-d 2007 – the winner of the Art4.ru competition on the best monument to the epoch of Boris Eltsin. Since 2007 has been working in his own style of ‘art-science’ Dmitry Kawarga ‘The attempts to understand the way I think led me to the idea of a possibility to visualize the thinking process. Then I began to materialize my thoughts themselves”, Kawarga The materiality of thoughts does not cause any doubt to Kawarga. Moreover, he finds it possible to speak about a certain type of condensed thought-forms endowed with their own independent consciousness as primitive living organisms would be. What do these thoughts and streams of consciousness look like? What are their internal structures and how do they sound? (The artist uses sound and light effects along with metals, acrylic and enamel). Kawarga, a profoundly conceptual artist, calls himself a radical of biological morphs. His works are a fusion of art and science, an enchanting journey into human consciousness, open to multiple interpretations. Though Kawarga employs dry scientific terms as titles for his creations, their incredible complexity and fragility resist explanation that would destroy the poetry of his art. The artists was born and lives in Moscow. In 1994 he graduated from the Theatre and art school. In 2007 Kawarga became the winner of the competition under aegis of Art4.ru Museum for the best monument to the epoch of Eltsin, the first Russian President. MANIFESTO By Dmitry Kawarga – Radical of Biological Morphs By naming myself a radical of biological morphs I have delineated an imaginary circle of my creative endeavours and distanced myself from any mainstream art. I like to see myself as an experimental research scientist immersed into my own experience, as a biological instrument of art capable of bringing into life unseen psycho-physiological mechanisms, by ‘dragging’ their three-dimensional projections into reality. The object of my study is the area accessible to tuning – consciousness, perception, thinking process as well as the psycho-physiological arrangement of other beings, including inanimate objects. I have had special, ‘intimate and warm’, relationship with art since I was a child. Each new artwork gradually changes my perception of reality and alters my reaction to life. These changes, in their turn, transform my priorities in art. I am curious where this chain of interrelationship will eventually lead me… Up to 1999 I mostly painted, but my paintings were getting more textured, as if they were inflated and swollen, as if the surface of the painting ceased to be flat and developed reliefs. While a part of the surface remained to be flat, the other – the textured and raised one - strove to break free by turning into a three-dimensional sculpture. The moment it happened with the painting, my own imaginary obstacle was swept away. I realized that in the same way I could ‘drag out’ into three-dimensional world not only the images and symbols of visible material world while staying within the traditional framework of visual art, but also what lies at the very source of it, what causes it – materialized fragments of abstract thought forms, stream of consciousness, thinking process, fragments of perception, reflexes, Gestalt. And these would not necessarily be sculptures and installations, but peculiar artefacts extracted through immersion into consciousness and subconscious. My works are a synthesis of art and science and presuppose a bio-reversible contact with the beholder, they emit noises of various frequencies, tremble and react to the human touch and the rhythm of the blood flow. The new series of interactive sculptures is titled ‘Unfulfilled intentions’ and includes amorphous and intentionally uncompleted structures containing robots inside them. They react to the touch of the beholder’s palm, to his/her voice, breathing and pulse by shuddering, moving, pulsing and humming as if being impregnated by each human contact, as if accumulating information from human bodies. Thus my creations are inexhaustible and ever changing, they absorb the energy, thoughts and rhythms of human contact. By Joel Simpson Dmitry Kawarga is a visionary in abstract polymer plastic, an extremely malleable medium that allows exquisitely detailed nuance of shape, edge and texture. It is completely white, so that form and shadow are the entire drama (except for his installation, see below). His art seems to be that of molding the rich store of forms generated by turbulent heating and pulling the medium, ending up with frozen (or “crystallized” in his terminology) forms that—if the viewer permits herself to see beyond the chaos—are marvelously expressive. This article will consider three bodies of Kawarga’s work: Crystallized Thought Forms (2008), The Diffusion of Form Creation (2009), and A Model of Biomorphic Consciousness (2007). It will become apparent later on why we take them out of chronological order. Kawarga’s Crystallized Thought Forms first present themselves as frozen flux—white polymer extrusions suspended in space or sitting on clear glass—but there are certain formal recurrences that can us lead to an understanding of Kawarga’s vocabulary in the medium, and ultimately of his themes. Take #985, for example. The center of gravity is a ponderous mass, like a half-deflated spider’s abdomen, with a smoothly folding surface. This extends by thick extrusion into a kind of proboscis that sports two round enclosed extensions, like folded back antennae. Threads of plastic. like thin streams of pulled taffy, emerge from the central mass, as if shot out like firework streamers, losing their straightness in squashvinelike or smokelike curlicues, the most forward one ending by hold a tiny outline of a cube. If we accept that this is a “thought form,” we can make a number of humorous inferences concerning Kawarga’s insights into human cognitive products. The center is an emotional mass, easily imagined to be expanding, contracting, morphing (but “crystallized” for now into immobility) into an endless series of undifferentiated random shapes, held together by forces akin to the mental counterparts of gravity, inertia and molecular cohesion, powered by habit, need, and desire. We catch it in the process of metamorphosing into the beginning of another thought. The streamers are distractions, fleeting velleities, hopeless wishes that burst out from the center and mostly fizzle out in the surrounding space. The little box outline is a small gestures of logic—appendages, afterthoughts to the main mass. Armed with such a gloss, the more complex #292 appears to be a large-scale thought-action, possibly a conflict between two or more thought-originators in verbal combat or trying to solve a problem from different perspectives. Denuded of their human bearers, who normally clothe their thoughts in decorous physical appearance and gestures of politeness (“Speech was given to man to disguise his thought”—Talleyrand), the thoughts by themselves appear quite monstrous, vaguely evoking dinosaurs, primitive fish, foetuses. As in #985, the central masses project smaller masses (“thought development”) as well as thin streamers. Here, however, there are many more outlines of cubes, and they are much larger. Some are bent. We can imagine that the contentious dialogue among these thinking entities invokes logic when appropriate, but it is just a tool and often distorted. Number 498 uses these same tropes, but there is a ragged hole in the middle of the central mass and what seem to be more and shorter projecting threads. The thinking entity has apparently just experienced a devastating rejection or refutation. The distractions are apparently more numerous but more futile. Elsewhere in this body of work, Kawarga seems to explore more extreme forms of thought. Sometimes the weighty emotional mass is absent, and all there is, is a twisted vertical cling-structure, with solid cube “roots” (a cute visual pun), and a flowering top with rows of button-like nubs (#979). I could see the thought form a true believer, a zealot, whose position is rooted logic, grows through narrow, anxious focus upon itself, and flowers in a repugnant blossom. Or what about #111, which extends like a reptilian jawbone with sharp but bent teeth, while the “head” is an interlacing of mostly thick doughy snakes culminating in a miniature abstract of the skull of a hammerhead shark? One senses that this piece describes intense, vengeful anger. After working on this series for about a year, Kawarga was well equipped to represent a subject as large as the Financial Crisis as one of his thought forms. His version of it seems perfectly clear. The main mass is collapsed and folded onto itself, forming an off-balance “S” with multi-form detritus on top and bottom, that includes rings, bars and projecting prickles, with a frozen drip vaguely resembling a human figure hung by the feet, extending from the back of the top curve down towards the end of the lower upsweep—a picture of structural collapse and its dire effects on the Investor. Then projecting out from this structure is a crowd of cube outlines, surmounted by two large solid cubes and intercalated with a few smaller solid ones. The “S” structure to one side is the loss, the pain, the bankrupt investment houses, the vaporized savings, loss of wealth and collapsed social class and non-profit organization—all at the mercy of a breaking wave of empty value. The cubes, once again, are the arguments, the principles, the logic on which the unstable structure was built, now revealed to be overwhelmingly empty, with a few floating exceptions. This last piece confirms Kawarga’s mastery of the visual language of his polymers. In a second body of work in the same medium, Diffusion of Form Creation, he takes it a step farther, unconstrained by the limits of his imagined topography of thought. Here Kawarga creates more convoluted and sometimes larger scale forms, using the shapes, twists, extrusions, snakes and cubes he had developed in his prior work. Thought, after all, may be physically formless, but it has its own emotional coherence generated by a virtual human subject. The works in his Diffusion of Form Creation series, however, begin to adumbrate a much more diversely formed natural world, the world that is outside the human mind. The first one on display from this series seems to present a screen surmounting a row of grotesque plants. Roots or succulents, their identity is left ambiguous, but their inhospitable muscularity is clear. The screen above them appears to be the water surface of a pond, whose milky liquid contains arthropod bodies, some of which poke up above the surface, in two cases in series of decreasing size. We see things resembling segmented curved abdomens, ruined wings, jointed insect feet, and strange body extensions. Kawarga is not trying to be literal, but he evokes the pond as metaphor for a self-contained ecosystem on three levels: under water, above water, and outside the range of the water (the “plants”). Grotesque growth has been followed by death and decay—not that dissimilar from the economic meltdown. The succeeding works in this series take the viewer into bizarre realms of plasticity well beyond those of the Thought Forms. Their elements include lines, braided twists, lipped tubes, bands, belts, clawlike fingers, rods, cube skeletons, apparent references to plant stems, sheathes, insect legs, intestines and other internal organs. Each sculpture is suspended on a meat hook, so floats in space, dramatizing its “rawness,” which here stands for Kawarga’s unmediated vision. Kawarga calls himself a “radical of biological morphs,” but this designation only conveys the nature of his sculptural language and does not hint at their power. The sculptures themselves, without requiring the viewer to analyze them, heave their meanings at us, and we may recoil from their ferocity, abstract though they are. Their biomorphic vocabulary grabs us in those places where we store our emotional connections to bodily and natural forms, including some very deep, intuitive places; then they twist and combine them in radical and violent ways, to convey their savage warnings. His grotesque creations seem to be saying that we have betrayed our natural environment and our biological nature. But Kawarga does offer some hope. His installation A Model of Biomorphic Consciousness, completed in 2007, precedes his other two bodies of work discussed above, but it offers an indirect affirmation of the possibility of connection with natural things outside ourselves, wherein may lie our redemption. It proposes no less than the exercise of empathy with an awareness that is entirely Other, entirely outside ourselves, that of a humble land snail. On a deeper level it connects us to our purely natural, pre-verbal origins. Visually, the installation consists of a series of black boxes, open at one end mount on poles at different heights, steadied with guy wires, with smaller boxes acting as counter-weights. Polymer ascendants twist and tease out tendrils, resembling ginseng roots and brain cells, while heaps of the plastic suggest moribund arthropods, and a petrified octopus. It’s extensively interactive. As the viewer looks inside the various boxes and touches sensors, her pulse, breath, emotional excitement level, hand temperature among other vital signs are registered and communicated to the virtual snails through the conditions of their “habitat”: temperature, level of light, physical vibrations, and the frequency and intensity of faint electric currents. The snails react by speeding up or slowing down, by hiding in their shells and altering their muscle tension. Microphones and video cameras record the reactions of the snails inside the sculptures, which the spectator observes, and which in tern may provoke changes in the physical state of the spectator, which then, following the loop, are fed back to the environment of snails, and so forth. Kawarga has thus permitted human spectators and virtual mollusks to interact in an intersubjective cybernetic system, harnessing each one’s “otherness” to each other at a reflexive, that is, involuntary level. It is an intensified, magnified demonstration of what happens at every moment between humans and the natural world that supports us, though most of us prefer to remain unaware. But it is also the implicit reply—if not a solution—to the conundrum posed by his later work, a 21st Century version of Voltaire’s injunction to cultivate one’s garden. We are creatures of nature. If we attune ourselves to our interdependence on the planet and all its systems which gave us our existence, and reign in our humanocentric, dominating attitudes (and the heedless greed of a very few) we can prosper. If not, we all perish. Joel Simpson holds a Ph. D. in comparative literature from Brown University and a Master of Music from Loyola University in New Orleans. He has variously taught English, French Italian, and jazz history at a number of universities, including Tulane, the University of New Orleans, Montclair State University, Drew University, Columbia and Fordham. Currently he writes art reviews for several publications and practices fine art photography, with recent shows in New York, Paris, and Tours, France. He is the creator of Dick Hyman’s Century of Jazz Piano CD-ROM (1999). His photographic work may be seen at www.barbarian-art.com and www.joelsimpsonart.com My installation is an attempt to make communication links material. Not the global common links where all of us are interwoven and built into, but the model of it that is crystallized inside each of us. I tried to realize and examine the „structure“ that allows me to be tuned into society and be adequate to its demands. The central part of the installation is equipped with a special device that transforms low audio frequencies into vibrations of various amplitudes causing resonant vibrations of the whole installation. It turned out that I exposed my biological structure by dragging it with hooks and chains and than animated it... All other sculptures sneaked upon by thin filaments of a vibrating and animated construction also represent certain materialized metaphysical processes, part of my own psycho physiological reactions. If one comes to think about it, one can talk about self-determination of a human being in space and about the sprawl of information links . With the increased transparency and penetrability of our world, the aura distances contract as well since the compression of the living space is directly related to the increased speed of traveling between places. Paul Virilio said that in epoch of globalization with its increasing pressure of world time, the risk of an event disappearance becomes the very essence of our history. When habitual models of world order are being split up, our individual consciousness changes too. A human being in a globalized world is next to impossible to be conceived as an independent and key figure of the universe. He/she is more likely to be perceived as a part of media field which is a cellular structure with no centre and boundaries being constantly compressed socially, politically, financially and, what is most important, in terms of information, while an individual escape from it seems to be not feasible. Any action of an individual has repercussions along the chain, though this chain is already under a permanent pressure that causes shock reactions. This pressure has a global character as if it is inherent in all ties, structures and human connections. An individual turns into a minute biological element – a tiny brick or a molecule in superhuman social mechanisms... Dmitry Kawarga 2007 - "Trepanation of the Thought-forms" gallery pop/off/art, Moscow 2005 - "Biomorphic radicalism in the destructive synthesis" gallery "Sam Brook", Moscow 2003 - "Retrospective Cut" Natural Science University, Moscow Curator I.E.Svetlov 2009 'Intrusion; rejection", Baibakov art project, Fabrika 'Krasny Oktyabr', Moscow, Russia, direct link http://artinvestment.ru/invest/events/20081215_baibakov_art_project.html 2008 Bridge Art Miami, Wynwood, 'Barbarian Art Gallery', Zurich "Aqua", State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Curator I. Kiblizky 2007 7th Krasnoyarsk Biennale 2007 Competition on the project to a monument to Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin Work is exhibited at a show-window of a museum ART4.RU "Art Moscow", (pop/off/art) "World of War"Museum Of Decorative Art Curator S. Naumov Moscow The Size Does Matter" Central House of Artists, Curator S.Popov, Moscow "Action Initiation", Art Laboratory Dominanta, Moscow "Bleeding of Spring" Malaya Gruzinskaya, Curator G. Vinigradov, Moscow Art Manezh, Moscow "Art Moscow", (Dominanta) "Fun-Art", Central House of Artists, Moscow Group "Hummer", Manezh, Moscow "Golden Brush", Central House of Artists, Moscow Malaya Gruzinskaya in Manezh , Moscow "Space and Spirit", Central House of Artists, Moscow Group "Hummer", Central House of Artists, Moscow In Memory of Pyatnitsky, Malaya Gruzinskaya , Moscow "Labyrinth", Palace of Youth, Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, Art4.RU, Moscow
Museum of Ecology and Local History, Muravlenko, Russia Museum Center of Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarsk, Russia |
