Lullaby
Kateryna Lesiv
May 23, 2018-June, 11, 2018
'The art reveals the spirit and transforms any image […] into an eye.
In this eye, a free soul in its internal infinity is cognized'
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Sometimes it is hard to find the right words to describe both simple laconic (objects) and more abstract (emotions) things. In this case, subjectivity of an individual perception creates
a comprehensive figurative metaphor with an encoded personal spectrum of pure analysis-free feelings.
A young artist Kateryna Lesiv (a graduate of the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture, Oleh Hryshchenko's student and 2017 Ukrainian Dummy Award winner) saw such a comparison in the Lullaby – as a personification of a stable emotional experience you have when detached from everything unimportant – a frozen moment.
This is an indirect reference to a common song form. Just like a mother's lullaby presents certain purification for the transition from one state to another, an image in artistic expression is modified into
a 'silent' conductor between two coupling points existing in everything around us – both material and spiritual world. It is a sensual and free detail that unveils the global.
An idea to design her own reflections into an integral system was already formed when she was studying at the Art Academy and working on her graduation paper which included the first four objects of the Lullaby (three of them are exhibited). This is how the painter herself describes this creative stage: 'When you work on a project for a long time, you become a single whole.' That is why her first personal exhibition in Ya Gallery Art Centre is basically the continuation of the chosen vector aimed at capturing the state you want to be in all the time.
The project's works are mostly film photographs designed as an installation and author's art books (printed with a risograph with a blind emboss). The format of the 'book' is not coincidental as it is a self-sufficient exhibition space – a static and dynamic object at the same time. This allows separate works to both preserve its personal zone and develop the individual in the common.
In a wider sense, the Lullaby project represents the judgments concentrated in an artistic image and makes one reflect: on the state everyone feels unconstrained and natural in; on the state which looks more like meditation; on the state which is a gap between an action and a received emotion.
Hanna Oryshchenko
[1] Hegel G.W.F. Aesthetics. In Four Volumes. Volume 1. Edited by Mikhail Lifshitz. – Moscow: Art Publishing House, 1968, p. 162-163
