Cherkasy . Cherkassy Regional Art Museum
The Ground
13.10.2011 – 13.12.2011
"The Ground" is a project about creative work, the way it really is, with no glamour and decorations.
Ya Gallery Art Centre presents project "The Ground" in Cherkasy Art Museum. This event will be held as part of the Second All-Ukrainian scientific-practical conference "Visuality in the Context of Cultural Practices" and festival "Three Dots".
The exhibition is an installation in itself that utilizes not only the walls of a former administrative building, that in the times of Independence symbolically became a fine arts museum, but also the very space and volume of the halls. According to the curator's concept, it is a re-exposition of the third floor, an acting model of a Ukrainian contemporary art museum and playing with classification and exhibits' placement into three categories:
1. Ground as a base, a material and a pure matter
"Art grew up on the Ground and only then arose to the skies".
2. Forest as a habitat, Eden, park, garden, as a vegetative material, wood, as a gathering and hunting territory.
3. Hunting - it is what we are all wholeheartedly passionate about, an unrestrained desire to capture the prey, ambitions, success, fame, career, power, war, freedom, independence...
Hints given by the curator both help and puzzle visitors who are entangled in this game.
For the majority of works included in the project it is the first "tour" of Ukrainian museums.
Only Kyiv spectators have seen the large-scale ceramics installation "Logs" by Olena Blank and the concrete project "Horizon" by Tiberiy Silvashi. Some works, particularly, "Geo" by Anton Logov, will be presented to the public for the first time.
It is necessary to emphasize the works of Oleksandr Sukholit and Oleksandr Babak from the 1990s that provided the basis for Ukrainian contemporary art development, as well as Pavlo Makov's profound research of utopia, Oleksandr Kadnikov's photo installations, Anna Voytenko's travels to Zakarpattia village Iza and powerful Donbas coal portraits by Oleksandr Chekmeniov.
National self-irony in the works of Mykola Matsenko, Mykyta Kravtsov's shot canvases, flowing matter in the works of Ihor Yanovych and Andriy Sahaydakovskyi's paintings on carpets create a unique atmosphere of this project and also weave the treads of the story about the relations of Us and Ground.
It all started out so well - Tamara Babak cut up some branches and made springy bows, Mykola Malyshko went into the woods and carved human figures with an axe, Oleksandr Ranchukov took voyeur pleasure in observing tree bark and Oleh Hrytsenko laid out large paper parsunas and transferred old parks upon them.
It didn't turn out pretty. "The Ground" is a project about creative work, the way it really is, with no glamour and decorations. Our art is artificial or synthetic in neither material, nor technique, nor thinking.