Does a painting cease to be an object once transformed into a digital entity? One of many questions posed by Yelena Popova’s current exhibition at the lacy shipping container on Fletcher Gate. It’s recommended to begin in what’s ordinarily Gallery 2, where vast air circulates and natural light beams into the space from above, onto several simple and pleasing works.
Large portrait paintings hang from the widest wall by brass chains, with lighter abstract images lying beneath a darker layer on each canvas. Strong lines flood them from the sectioned, sloped skylights. “We’ve used the brass chains so the paintings are leaning towards you,” says Yelena. “It’s akin to the retro type of academia hang – the paintings went all the way from floor to ceiling, with the highest paintings leaning towards the audience so they can see the image clearly.”
Yelena encourages visitors to take a seat on the traditional gallery benches in the middle of the room, slowing down to absorb the larger paintings. Images appear and disappear both with the changing light in the room and tricks in the mind, raising the question of how work is perceived by the audience. “If something is not quite there, what do people see?” Yelena asks. It all relates back to digital – “What is a painting? What is an image?”
A water-based medium has allowed the artist to control transparency, “to mix and prepare, like in cooking”, she says. Every detail counts in minimalism, and this is no ready-made meal. The paintings may fade in the natural light, but the artist says she likes that as the work is “not an unchangeable thing.” All these elements – slowing things down, making one’s own paint, morphing perception, and natural light – connect to Yelena’s wider ideas:
“I’m looking at how painting functions in the age of digital media, post-internet. So what happens when we used to look at paintings online? As a painter, I do look at a lot of paintings online. Usually people go to the museums, and most likely they have seen images of the paintings before. So what happens if we divide the painting and the image? If a painting is not its own image, what’s left there? What is it? How do you perceive an image? Is it an image? Is it an object? Is it a space? Is it an experience? The installation is looking at the painting and how it functions in the public gallery.”
In the same space, the colourful Circles and Ovals is cheeky and forward thinking. Round paintings balance, sit outside frames, inside frames, on frames, above them, below them, too small for the frames, too wide for the frames, all with bits of wood scattered on the floor below, and a head sculpture lying with them. The sculpture is a copy of a copy of a copy, many times over, pointing to ideas about ownership, possession, heritage, lineage and painting. The bits of wood are recognisable from furniture and also connect to the body.
“The objects are leaning against each other to create the space. Like the whole gallery, it’s playing with the conventions of the display, so how paintings are actually exhibited. The current, or the predominant convention since the early twentieth century was the wide cube, so there’s one single object on the wall with lots of space around it, at the level of the eye. I’m just playing against that convention.
“This part of the exhibition [Gallery 2] builds on a previous body of work. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while, especially the colourful painting, the balanced installation. That’s something I’ve been developing for five years, but it almost becomes a recognisable gesture, so we felt it was important for the Nottingham audience to see that type of earlier work I was making.”
In Gallery 1, the atmosphere becomes darker, while the hypnotic and bright video This Certifies That is projected at one end of the room. An eerie, looming, enchanted soundscape plays through four speakers standing in front of the screen, creating the corners of a quadrilateral shape, a kind of experience-floor. The audience is encouraged to explore the music from different physical positions, listening out for various textures and feelings being played through the different speakers.
The animation is mesmerising. Code-generated sequences of moving images based on the Euro banknote are layered and constantly shifting. No pattern will ever be repeated, with an infinite combination of banknote versions ranging in denominations from five to five hundred slipping and sliding between each other. Collaborating with computer programmer Noel Murphy to develop the code, Yelena has produced something quite different to her previous work we saw back in 2013 that was exhibited in Antenna.
“I used to shoot myself documentary-type footage and then put the voiceover over it. I felt it would be better if the image was closer to the way I construct paintings, so it’s quite layered. The use of the machine and the code-generated sequence is the biggest change in terms of the way I was using video before.”
The soundscape, devised and composed by Nottingham artist Rebecca Lee, has been built from a variety of samples – both human and simulated voices – and is also constantly moving. “I have been working closely with Rebecca Lee. It’s the third time we’ve collaborated on video and I think it’s becoming deeper and better the more we work together. It feels like the work is evolving constantly.” As we stand in the gallery, a male voice reaches out from the soundscape: “Anyone can trade goods, anyone can trade virtue.”
Yelena started this particular project a year ago, alluding to political forgery and flooding the economy with fake money, which happened in Russia. Circulation channels through in this piece, as does the idea of layers and layered thinking as found in the first part of the experience. And again, Yelena asks “How much do you have to give away for someone to take something from it?” as we watch images that are trying to be real. A vague image of a 3D, sculptural head spins around which was “free, online, and ready to use” for the piece, signalling these ideas of value, ownership, heritage, museum, copy and replica.
Copper plates sit beside the video – etchings made in the limited number of thirty. The material refers back to the traditional way of printing money, where the wallpaper on the opposite wall dominates with lines used in an anti-forgery feature introduced by the Bank of England in the late eighteenth century. These elegant, formal lines again speak of layers.
If you hang around for long enough, you’ll discover that the video animation eventually ‘crashes’ into blankness, a screen dominated by white space. Then it begins again. This happens once every twelve minutes – a barrage of sounds and images followed by pure quiet.
Other pieces in this space include Cornelius: The Collector’s Case and Russian Radicals. The former is a flight case holding ten paintings, again highlighting ownership and value of the object. Yelena speaks of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi general who hoarded thousands of Modernist art works on a shelf unit in the middle of a flat in Germany. It’s these kinds of stories that have brought into question the devices of paintings and displays.
Researching radical Russian movements, Yelena discovered most of the intellectuals were men with beards. Russian Radicals is a series of anonymous stoneware portraying these characters on stoneware, playfully pieced together with aspects missing and moved, again harking back to political forgery. She found the alchemy of the glazes interesting, using the medium to refer to contemporary style, challenging the ideas of Russian thinking.
“I recently discovered ceramics, so it’s the first kind of trial moving in that direction,” says Yelena. “The work is constantly shifting, and I do get excited about lots of different ideas.”
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