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For a long time, Dmitry has been referring to the topics of apocalypse and wreckage of the world — as if foreboding the upcoming changes. Today, when the very concept of global order is collapsing, Kawarga suggests that we should reflect on our roots by means of introspection.
The artist believes that the natural landscape is a place where memories and history are stored. Fleeing from the city and setting out on a travel across woods and fields of the North, Kawarga projects his inner data formations to the natural sceneries. 'Endless flames of events, the historical epos and stories of people’s everyday life, images of writers and scientists, tragic stories about particular people and entire generations, victims of wars, revolutions, and repressions, sophisticated mechanisms and childhood dreams — all of these seem to be filed in a unique glimmering multidimensionality that my eyes can see', the artist explains.
The project is a story about the fusion of culture and natural matters. It’s the synthesis that the artist uses to decode our civilization’s origins, enciphered in the environment, whether in bends and curves of fallen trees’ roots or in the silence of Russian wetlands. Culture-related knowledge deposits over the environment, thus creating exterior and inner landscape.
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Inner Landscape Membranes
Inner Landscape Membranes is a new series of 8 paintings. The artist deconstructs the conventional concept of landscapes in them, cutting through the canvases and inhabiting them with his polymer matters, made by means of additive technology — 3D crystalline resin inserts with tiny plastic figures. The works feature a combination of genres — they are no longer paintings and yet they are not sculptures. They are more like materialized fragments of the artist’s mental processes, impressions and shatters of his take on the world.
Kawarga explains, 'I watch projections of my data layers that entwine themselves in curved roots of fallen trees, compressed silence of the bogs, and flight of a bird in haste. Mind of a citified human that is as fragile as an egg shell, so ruthlessly obsessed with the processes within, all of a sudden ends up on the outside. Now, it’s a soft impetus of an echo sounder that pierces the landscape thickness down to its historical bottom — or even beyond'.
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The Archivation of the Posthuman Compost
The Archivation of the Posthuman Compost series features many differently sized vials with solidified substrate within — attributes of human life, traces of social processes, intellectual terms and personal reflections, whether it be an evolutional, a feminine, a philosophical, or a revolutionary matter. All of them, collected and corked, reflect the worldview shaped by humans. The reality we live in.
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Deep Matter
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The huge 7-meters-high Deep Matter installation presents a sort of dark pulsating substance that keeps making rhythmic booms as if it were an enormous underground machine. This kinetic machinery made of a wide range of polymer materials, metal, and 3D printed shapes moves and throbs, 'bleeds' with color liquid resembling a living organism. Its movement simulates contractions of earthworms, its segments extending and stretching, and then shrinking in wrinkles.
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The installation presents an aspiration to change that results in a destructive power, which doesn’t just destroy ones of its kind but itself, too. Such a philosophy inevitably leads to the only possible outcome — wreckage and devastation.
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In his text about the US eco-black-metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, philosopher Timothy Morton speaks of the world image and its importance in today’s ecology. In an interview, the musicians themselves said that in their attempt to represent the ecological situation with technical means (like guitars, volume boosters, and advanced digital mastering) they become gates of hypocrisy. To experience something the Wolves in the Throne Room spoke of, the negative catharsis, we have to blend something that isn’t natural, something synthetic and polymer with Earth’s landscapes.
We experience the negative catharsis on the edge of civilization, on the edge of Enlightenment dialectics, collapsing all the academic and technological inventions into our nostalgia over the nature killed. We’re also aware that in eco-metal all the sounding is based on reverberation — it is it that creates a 3D or even corporeal experience that bemuses you when you get to a throne room and see seven wolves sitting there instead of the kings (like in a well-known Wolf Man’s dream recorded by Sigmund Freud). And Dmitry Kawarga’s works fit well in this concept of image dystopic ecology. His renowned method of biomorphic texture and relief making ensures that the audience take on the sculpture (and painting in this case) as on an audio landscape negative from the space where his subjects appear. This sculpture is shaped not in compliance with medial characteristics like pressure, weight, or contrapposto, but with the external exhibition atmosphere where volume is created by the length of the wave repelled from the exhibition venue walls. It is peculiar how Kawarga, who takes effort to avoid publicity, becomes a sculpture of his own. This is a sculpture that showcases the echo of nature.
Boris Klyushnikov, art historian
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