A VERY ARTIFICIAL CHOICE.

20 april 2017 - 10 june 2017

A Very Artificial Choice" is a new project from Semyon Motolyanets that combines works from several different thematic series created specifically for this exhibition at Marina Gisich Gallery: prehistoric-looking skull objects, paintings that pull you into the space on "the other side" of the canvas, and collages and compositions compiled from fragments of raw materials. The central part of the exposition will display the series of sculptures shaped as human heads and chiseled from the cobbles. Visually they are meant to create the illusion of presence of the archaic time findings - as if they just accidentally mixed in with the contemporary context.


Semyon Motolyanets: "Observing how beauty is produced in work interiors has evolved into a full-scale visual study for me. The embellishments that workers add in their spare moments aren't about aesthetics. It's like a road construction worker writing his name on the asphalt, or a house painter using leftover paint to attempt a picture of something. As an artist, I am certainly not trying to become this type of worker. My approach does strive to achieve this type of form, but by visually analyzing the work environment, I try to reconstruct image and form, utilizing the "everyday" that goes unnoticed when viewed from within the creative process. Different dimensions of interaction with the same substances emerge. On the one hand, wood shavings from the carpentry workshop become part of three-dimensional collages, and on the other hand, they are turned into compositions where it's essential that the scraps remain untouched and untransformed; they are simply arranged in the space. What makes it interesting is that these scraps are rejected from production like useless bits. After considering all these things that inspire me, I came to the conclusion that I need to go back and pick through what seem to be previously discarded elements, make an artificial choice and perform one more culling. The paintings in this project also have a defective element that allows us to peek beyond the image and thus neutralize the thing."


While preparing the exhibition curator Kerim Ragimov is making the interview with the artist Semyon Motolyanets. Ragimov is asking the questions, which don’t have the direct connection with the exhibition’s contents and mostly appeal to the field of the unconsciousness (since Ragimov is not aware beforehand what exactly Motolyanets is working under at the moment). At the exhibition the dialogue will be visualized as the correspondence, and the curator’s figure in this project is “fusing in the mist”, creating a sensation of the invisible confessor or a spiritual guide’s presents.