BOGDANDAREV
I'm interested in the healing aspect of art and its capacity to transform internal and external spaces. A visceral dance between nature and the built environment, my investigations live in the rupture of the form, the spiral that binds the past and the present, the individual and the collective, the part and the whole. I identify forms of interconnectivity and crisis through the processes of transformation and transmutation. Clay has been my primary material which I have questioned through the application and interpretation of steel, paper, found material, projection and my own body.
Checklist-unchecked. This lockdown has gifted me the time for introspection and reevaluation. To check is to to restrict, to restrain, but also to examine and to curb.Rethinking my work and place of belonging shifted the light towards what has been taken for granted: family, friends, food, human connection, life itself.I looked into materials that I had found meaningful in the past but neglected to explore new and more technically challenging paths.
This exhibit reflects on the ephemeral essence of substance and empathy while curbing restrain and reexamining form and content in a restrictive environment. It stitches the “to do” lists of my domestic, social and work lives.
artist book: linen, thread, ink, clay, paper
2020
Ink-infested rainwater droplets are left to evaporate on paper presoaked in puddles. The process of dehydration and pigmentation augments the visibility of the particles otherwise hidden in the liquid. Likewise, the creative process infiltrates the self through distilling experiences from the environment.
installation art: plastic, rope, wood, fabric, body
2019
A pedestal representing data on water pollution is tightly wrapped in plastic bags accounting for the trash produced in a small residential building for a week. Tying and embracing this unbearable pile embodies empathy as an act of a collective responsibility when addressing conflict and crisis.
Sound: Crows roosting at Green Lake on the day my father died. Crows have an amazing sense of kinship and memory and i wish the same for our collective earth. (personal phone recording, January 31, 2020)
installation art: body wrapped in wool thread, plastic
2018
How does the current ecological crisis shape the ephemeral? Long after its organic counterparts have disintegrated, plastic remains in the earth's womb. The thread becomes a path, an umbilical cord, a beginning and an end.
paper form: paper, clay, thread
2020
The horizontal plane crosses the vertical cosmos to coordinate a point in the immediate reality of existence where one learns to will and surrender life's structure, substance and history. An imprint of an imprint memory weighs.
Sound: Mozart's Requiem at St. Stephen Cathedral, Vienna, Austria. (personal phone recording, July 26, 2019)
ceramic figure: clay, ink, charcoal
2020
(pan - all, sperma - seed) A theoretical origin of life on earth from a meteorite brought seed.
Much of my work explores the resilience in cycles of creation and destruction. This form moves with the idea of an emergence after impact.
Sound: Abundant insect choir at the catacombs in the Etruscan City of the Dead, Tarquinia, Italy. (personal phone recording, July 3, 2019.)