“TIME KEEPING” BY ELENA GUBANOVA AND IVAN GOVORKOV

🗓️April 27 – June 5, 2016

GISICH GALLERY
📍121 Fontanka River Embankment, St. Petersburg 190068 Russia

◆CYLAND Artists Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov Exhibit◆

Artists’ Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov Exhibit at Gisich Gallery

For 10 years, Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov have been successfully dividing their artistic life into two separate parts: classical painting and media art. The discerning mind of the artist can no longer use solely classic techniques for creating works of art. The experience of modernity extends beyond the surface of paintings or the dimension of sculptures, and time becomes an instrument and object of art.

Keeping Time is one of the central installations in the project. The viewer’s shadow falling on the wall seems to “turn on” each individual’s personal time with the sound of ticking clocks in closed storage boxes. Everyone has their own rhythm, their own time.

The exposition has several parts: Observation, Time, Melancholy, Timelessness, and Gravity. In this project, the artists intentionally combine various styles and genres of their art, painting, video and objects.

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By placing different pieces together, they try to accentuate the relationships that can connect these works, creating a dramatic emotional tension. For example, the Observation section combines the series Observation of Mars in 1937 (paintings with photos of astronomical observations from 1937) and the video installation Eclipse. In the Melancholy section, black-and-white images of an abandoned observatory are connected by their tension with the painting-object Dream (1978-20015). In Gravity, a sculpture of interconnected clamps in Dark Matter illustrates the theme of connection that is sometimes violent in life and mysterious in the cosmos. One of the artists’ new installations, Eclipse, is best understood as the space between the past, present and future. What is at first frightening in its twilight and absence of brightly illuminated direction turns into the instant between the collapse of the old system of relationships and something newly emerging.

The exhibition is based on a person’s self-reflection on the internal perception of time. Similar to laboratory work, it demonstrates the fluidity of the moment, the physical experience of the moment through sound and metaphor. The artists combine video art with contemporary dynamic objects. The cyber-poetry and sensuality of the project can be sensed on the conceptual level in the dynamic installations and motherboards. The world changes; art is eternal, no matter what form it speaks in.