Structures
Today, the smartphone is our constant intermediary between our body, consciousness, and reality. We are simultaneously present in the digital and material worlds, capturing reality through a digital screen. Our memory has become fragile and ephemeral: it remains in social media feeds or disappears without a trace.
The “Structures” project is an exploration of a person living between screens and urban space. Their perception is formed at the boundary between the digital and the real.
The project is based on classic RA-4 (C-print) color printing, done by hand in a darkroom. All photographs were taken on a smartphone. Instead of a traditional negative, digital printing is used—the LEDs on the smartphone screen replace the lamp of the enlarger. Due to the multiple magnification, the grid of LEDs is visible in the print, forming the structure of the image, thus transforming the pixel grid into part of the work’s language. This method combines the materiality of the analog image with the immateriality of digital light. The boundary between them becomes the subject of exploration.
The pixel in the project is similar to Pavel Filonov’s pictorial structure—the elementary unit from which a new materiality is formed. Filonov called the point of action an “atom”—tiny units of color from which, like molecules, the organism of a painting grows. In “Structures,” the pixel becomes a contemporary analogue of this point: a digital grapheme, the building block of an image of a new world.
The photographs are observations of everyday life, following the routes from home to work, on public transport, on the streets. Moscow in the 2020s appears as a space of limitations: architectural grids, fences, screens. The digital grid becomes a metaphor for the urban fabric. The structure of the pixel reflects the structure of the world, where the boundaries of the medium, the city, and perception merge into a single system.
The artist addresses the duality of the contemporary gaze—divided between screen and body, external and internal. Reflections in glass and screen surfaces create a double image, creating a metaphor for layered perception. In this space, a person becomes lost, feeling vulnerable and lost. They seem to be dissolved in streams of light and data, subject to the rhythms of the city and cars. The landscape tilts and disintegrates, the space deforms, expressing anxiety and the instability of existence.
Each print is 60-80 cm in size, on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper.
The project was realized in the workshops of the Svody Art Production Center.
