Photosculpture
2013—ongoing
My photosculpture grapples with how the photographic medium can give rise to form and autonomous objects not anchored in straightforward representation.
It has developed from juxtapositions of contorted overpainted prints and concrete blocks to foreground the materiality of support (Indeterminate Objects), to combinations of freeform light streaks with architectonic forms pointing to the tangled relationship between photography and representations of architecture (early Leaks), and finally to photography as architecture — in the recent Leak pieces, the lines in printed light leaks serve as guides to three-dimensional forms. The folded shape is then interpreted in cast concrete with the print retained as a 'skin'. Thus simple light patterns or gradients — the most basic photographic marks — go from registration on paper to solid objects.
Hovering somewhere between the handmade, the industrial and the archeological, my sculptures also touch on how the formal can generate affect — or an illusion thereof. Another thread running through is one of ruins. "Contemporary ruin gaze is a gaze reconciled to perspectivism, to conjectural history and spatial discontinuity. [It] requires an acceptance of disharmony, of the contrapunctual relationship of human, historical and natural temporality”. [Svetlana Boym in 'Ruins of the Twentieth Century', in Frieze Projects and Frieze Talks 2006-2008 . 2009. London: Frieze Publishing Ltd, p.166]
Exhibition history:
UNTITLED. Miami Beach
Denny Gallery, Booth B6
November 29 – December 4, 2016
Emerged – Part I
Joanna Bryant & Julian Page, London
June 28–July 2, 2016
Emerged – Part II
Joanna Bryant & Julian Page, London
July 5–10, 2016
PERFECTIoNISM (Part III): The Alchemy of Making
Griffin Gallery, London
October 4–November 18, 2016
Penumbra
Denny Gallery, New York
November 19—Dec 23, 2015
Art Omi Weekend
Art Omi, Ghent, NY
July 12—13, 2014
Nikolai Ishchuk: Indeterminate Objects
Denny Gallery, New York
February 6—March 16, 2014
UNTITLED. Miami Beach
Denny Gallery, Booth B20
December 2—8, 2013
Studio Series. Chapter 4. Nikolai Ishchuk
Foodface, London
July 18—20, 2013
