Temporal Touch: USTINA YAKOVLEVA

Temporal Touch is a personal project of Ustina Yakovleva. The artist's special myth-making, woven from memory and chaos, transformed and reworked with the help of various media, is an attempt to return the viewer to mythological consciousness in our pragmatic digital age.

 

By combining painting, graphics and objects created by the artist in different years, the exhibition demonstrates that the flowing lines of abstract images and mysterious creatures of some underwater world were born from the same meta environment. Dreams, creation myths, folk tales, mystical rituals, wildlife and contemporary art converge in this imaginary space. Having left their native environment, fragile objects that store the memory of painstaking manual labor, remind the outside world of preciousness of time as the main human resource. Time streams are like water, which gives life to all life on Earth.

 

For Ustina the process of art creation is like a meditation practice. Every stroke and stitch continues the body movement expression. Full of expressive lines and ringing colorful voids, her monumental canvases spread out, ponderate diligence triumphing over mundanity. At the same time, embroidery develops the graphic technique, transformed into volumetric measuring. The artist uses ornamental drawing and bead weaving to get close to archaic experience of cult objects’ creation. She gets inspired by natural shapes, studies domestic items and costumes of ancient peoples, as well as their ritual artefacts. Fantastic mollusks and jelly-fish made of silk threads and shiny beads refer to the male and female principles, taking the audience back to their mythological consciousness. Thus, ethnographic observations, flowing through the prism of the artist’s view, entwine with her personal experience and mystic codes of world comprehension, building a new artistic language. In terms of this language, new shapes are made based on the visual and tactual memory.