Burning of immature hopes

Burning immature hopes

Object: series of 10 photos (30 x 40 cm)

Materials and Techniques: photography

Not previously exhibited

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This project was created to capture the movement of fire. Initially it was quite a logical construction, when the motion spread from point to point (as in mathematics textbooks from point A to point B), where points are match heads. Adjusting the camera focus, I was sure that if I made long exposure (for about 6 or 7 seconds), the matches would have time to burn, leaving a beautiful trace of fire movement on pictures. The experiment refuted this assumption and gave me a strong creative impulse to follow not the logic of the process, but the process itself. The very fact that eventually I will use paints and brushes will become a kind of revelation. I named this state the “burning of immature hopes”, using the phrase from the Silver Age of Russian poetry, which was in tune with my mood in that our intentions are only ideas about life and movement. The result of implementing our intentions in real life differs from our mental images. Therefore, our perceptions of events are just “immature hopes”, “burning” this hopes we get the opportunity to get in touch with reality. Having burned them we gain freedom to research reality, not just to experience it. So we may examine series of photos from different views and perspectives. We may consider them as a part of the action art history, as a photo experiment, when exposure and diaphragm allow you to see how the color richness appears in certain periods of time (this refers to painting over matches, when the shutter speed was 10 seconds, and the lens was open at the time of applying the paint, so the process of coloring was conducted online). This work can also be considered as an illustration of the culturological theories of the 20th century, etc.

I’m an artist representing the hyperreality. The «Burning immature hopes» project is a humanitarian concept, enabling to trace the fire energy evolution. By this work I certainly want to say that it is possible to go from practice to theory (within the art). I also want to show the opportunity to consider the theoretical academic field as a postmodernism sign, free for creative interpretation.

artist Konstantin Evmenev

Tel-Aviv 2024.

The project was presented at the “Innovation” contemporary art competition. Moscow 2009.