Elena Volkova: Airscapes
November 21 – December 20, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, November 21: 5-7pm
Flashpoint Gallery
Washington, DC
WASHINGTON, DC Cultural Development Corporation is thrilled to announce Elena Volkova’s Airscapes, part of the inaugural, city-wide FotoWeek DC. “Airscapes is a collection of photo-based prints of clouds that deal with the human perception of boundaries and the essence of a subject against a background of nothingness,” says Volkova whose show opens Friday, November 21 from 5-7pm and runs through December 20, 2008.
Volkova uses clouds to examine how much visual information is needed to discern subject matter. The clouds become barely perceptible and fade into the white of the paper to evoke a sense of vastness. The concept of nothingness is at the core of Volkova’s work, but a nothingness that is understood in Eastern philosophy as a beginning and potential. The artist seeks to capture an experience rather than an object and eschews its “thingness” in favor of a sensory effect.
Volkova’s interest continues into how a viewer sees the actual images on the paper. The artist prints the images on the paper, leaving a margin of whiteness between the edge of the paper and the edge of the image to suggest a sense of infiniteness. The artist rejects traditional framing and instead the framing occurs in layers- the framing of the image within the camera, the use of a border and the edge of the paper, as well as the installation of the prints within the gallery space.
“What remains are representations of the void as possibility or fullness, not gloom or emptiness, ethereal interstices, where perception and imagination converge,” said Sarah Tanguy, independent curator and critic.
