We are delight to invite you to the exhibition launch of:

Lobotomy. Igor Yanovych, Anton Logov

Opening will take place on 7th of December at 7 p.m. in Ya Gallery art centre on 55/57 Voloska Str

"We need politics that would keep the people dumb"

Chinese dictator, XX century

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"

Tom Waits

"Lobotomy" is a mutual project of Igor Yanovych, an artist of the older generation, and Anton Logov, a Genofond project participant. The close communication between them that has already lasted for three years manages to avoid not only labels of age census (forty four years of age difference) and inconveniences of geographic distance between Kyiv and Lviv, but also edits the consistent concept of a cooperative exhibition - all the works in the project "Lobotomy" were literally created "together". Having overcome these obstacles the artists gathered together in order to testify an invasion. Ambiguity of titles, characteristic of Logov's cycles, refers the spectator to understand the meaning of the word "invasion" in the form of "lobotomy", to the "invasion" that takes over personal subjective space - the one that Yanovych has already investigated (series "Subjective Space", 2010).

Lobotomy is a neurosurgical procedure during which tissues connecting the frontal lobes with the rest of the brain are cut. Frontal lobes are in charge of self-awareness and decision-making, that is why the consequences of the operation are, generally, inadequacy and heightened controllability of the patient.

The brain becomes a battlefield. Consciousness becomes an art object.

Works presented in Ya Gallery portray the collision between the instruments of influence with the brain substance on different stages of interaction. A kind of a closeup of the private mind's space provides an opportunity to see these processes. In the center of attention is not a consistent wall-nut-like construct, not a human brain as an iconic form (that Einstein's brain still remains), but the very invisible acting substance - the intellectual gray matter.

At first the invasion is recorded, then, as a consequence, the change in consciousness. Gray substance creates vague geometric forms on the canvas - as if a depiction of the soft thinking zones. They are masterfully governed by black firm and thick forms resemblant of a plow and a scalpel. This results in incontrollable stains and lost self-control. Streaks remind of an old building's ceiling that had repeatedly survived floods of the Old Testament scale, but still keeps good shape. In the exact same way the victims of the new lobotomy, that eliminates the connection between human and humanity, along with consciousness loose their evolutionary decency, keeping an image of socially developed, yet primates.

What is the task set for the spectator? Is it to overcome lobotomy?

Rather, no. The task is a more modest and gradual one. It is to return the consciousness to the brain.

To recognize oneself as an independent subject of observation, having activated one's own brain to do so.

A brain that is never tired.

Borys Filonenko, November 2011