Through a Clouded Lens: Three Ways of Seeing
Let’s imagine a gallery that exists only in the mind. Dmitrii Andrianov’s Mental Noise swirls with silver mists, Igor Khlopotov’s photographs blur like distant memories, and Polina Kulbachevskaia’s dancers move in quiet, shadowed rituals. The surfaces shimmers, not unlike that moment when you close your eyes and try to grasp at passing ideas, only to watch them dissolve.
Dmitrii Andrianov: Mental Noise and Golden Traces
Having been raised in both Russia and Israel, Andrianov bears the unique burden of a dual perspective. His background in disaster management manifests in works that attempt to organize chaos — a futile yet necessary pursuit. In "The Value of Hands," golden gloves rest on canvas like artifacts from a civilization that finally learned to honor its invisible workers. They remind us of discarded work gloves we've seen in construction sites, now transformed into something between reliquary and reminder.
In Mental Noise (2023), abstract forms spiral in a silver haze, reflecting the chaotic fragmentation of human consciousness, constantly torn between media overload, misinformation, and the tangled, unsaid thoughts we carry.
OnlyFacts (2024) breaks apart reality, a digital collage of torn newspaper pieces scattered across the canvas — a metaphor for the shattered truths we live with. The work pushes us to reckon with the falsehoods, the gaps, the distorted realities.
Igor Khlopotov: Light Leaks and Memory Traces
Igor Khlopotov’s photography is rooted in personal history, a reflection on the passage of time and the fragile nature of memory. Through the viewfinder of his grandfather's camera, each frame emerges like a half-remembered dream. The machine itself is weathered, imperfect — a mechanical artifact carrying its own history in scratches and worn edges. Light seeps in where it shouldn't, creating aureoles of unexpected luminescence, like memories bleeding into one another.
Khlopotov's photographs exist in that liminal (the word of 2024) space between presence and absence. His lens seeks out the ordinary moments that slip between the cracks of consciousness — a hand resting on a windowsill, the particular angle of afternoon light across a wooden floor. These aren't documents but reveries, each frame an invitation to linger in that uncertain space between what was and what we think we remember.
What started with a child's fascination — "clouds, leaves, sun glare, friends" — has evolved into something more profound. The camera's mechanical heart beats with three temporal pulses: the grandfather's original touch, Khlopotov's present-day vision, and time itself, visible in the aging mechanism's peculiar signatures.
Polina Kulbachevskaia: Midnight Rituals
In Polina Kulbachevskaya's video "Midnight," nine dancers move through light that shouldn't exist — warm like fire but artificial, cool like moonlight but manufactured. Their bodies form and reform around an absent center, performing ancient gestures with modern anxiety, like priestesses caught between old magic and new world order.
The glow from above meets the flame-like warmth below, creating a space where time feels suspended. We watch the dancers circle their artificial fire, and somehow it feels both more and less real than genuine flame — not unlike the way Bill Viola's figures move through water in "The Crossing," suspended between elements, between states of being. The work loops endlessly, like a ritual that never quite concludes, never quite reveals its purpose.
The cyclical nature of the piece brings to mind Ana Mendieta's "Silueta" series — where the body becomes both present and absent, both performer and symbol. Kulbachevskaya's dancers, too, seem to exist between presence and absence, their movements shifting between sharp modernist angles and fluid, primordial gestures, as if their bodies are channeling both contemporary fluids and ancestral memory.
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These three artists offer us different ways of seeing what usually escapes notice: the noise in our heads, the gaps in our memories, the rituals we can't quite explain. Through their lens, we learn to practice Lynch's art of sitting still, letting the unconscious surface through the cracks of perception. And so we return to our concrete slope by the river, by the ocean, by the sea, where time pools like water, and the boundary between seeing and remembering grows delightfully thin.