REVIEWS
Posted on: 01.2.12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLMaUhftN5M&sns=em
zoige production
interview
Posted on: 12.11.10
Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when, deep into the movie, Dr. Jones takes a leap of faith into what appears to be a deep chasm but is in fact a land bridge whose outline he can’t distinguish from the far cavern wall? “Proofs,” a site-specific photography exhibition of Elena Volkova’s work at Hamiltonian Gallery, draws on a similar trick of perception, obscuring the gallery’s walls and floorboards with photographs of the same, and challenging the viewer to tease out the nuance in between. Some of Volkova’s photos obscure the very parts of the gallery space they depict. In other images an opposite wall might be portrayed, and still other photographs are plain disorienting. In a sense Volkova is asking the viewer to take a leap of faith—to trust in the concrete and truthful nature of photography even as she so simply and ably commandeers the viewer’s sense of doubt and ambiguity. That demonstration is both rational and, in an appealing way, very sculptural—a point she makes about 2-D images primarily through the third dimension.
Kriston Capps / Washington City Paper
"Proofs" at Hamiltonian Gallery
Posted on: 12.11.10
Volkova's photography of plain drywall can leave viewers drawing a blank
The real deal? In her photo series, Elena Volkova documents nondescript corners of the Hamiltonian Gallery.
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2010
The last in a series of daily reviews looking at images from FotoWeek DC, Washington's third annual celebration of photography.
The standard assumption, when we look at photographs, is that they're fine stand-ins for some corner of the world. In a show tellingly called "Proofs," local artist Elena Volkova tests that assumption.
A little while back, Volkova photographed nondescript corners of the Hamiltonian Gallery on U Street NW. Now, for FotoWeek, she's installed those photos in the places they were taken, at the same scale as the architecture they show.
Just to the left as you walk in, a photograph shows the course of brick that runs above the gallery's floor as well as an angle in the drywall that sits above it. It's propped on the floor so that it hides precisely the bricks and walls depicted in it.
Other photos are of a plain blank wall, showing the faintest hints of drips and paint-roller texture. They're hung over white wall that, we imagine, features those same drips and texture -- though we can't tell, because that very wall is hidden by the photos sitting on it.
Still other photographs hang on the wall but show details of the gallery's white-on-white track lighting or of architectural detailing that's nowhere near where they hang.
Volkova's photos get us constantly checking our beliefs about what photographs show. No matter how hard she tried to match photo and scene, there are always gaps that prevent a perfect match. In that front-corner shot, there's no angle you can get to that makes the photograph and drywall line up perfectly. Volkova's wall shots presumably conceal the very surfaces they depict, so we can never affirm their truth -- or their lies. When we look up from Volkova's ceiling shots, we're surprised to find a somewhat different configuration of track lights -- but we don't know if the ceiling once looked as it does in the photos.
Volkova's photos come close to the traditional, superficial trickery of old master trompe l'oeil, where paint was made to be mistaken for reality. What's surprising is that, despite her use of a medium that ought to make truth easier to tell, she puts so much in doubt.
Blake Gopnik/the Washington Post
Volkova's photography of plain drywall can leave viewers drawing a blank
Posted on: 03.16.09
http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=17686
Kate Noonan, Baltimore City Paper
This is not a pipe
Posted on: 01.22.09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSGJWacfLKY
(copy and paste link)
Todd Wiggins
Interview at Flashpoint Gallery
Posted on: 05.27.08
http://www.radarredux.net/reviews/volkova_rev.html
RadarRedux
Audio Interview
Posted on: 02.14.08
Viewing the recent work of Elena Volkova immediately involves the viewer with questions about their awareness of boundaries and location. To paraphrase Edmund Jabes observation that “Light needs much dark in order to dazzle”*, these works need much space in order to be situated.
By paying close attention to some of the images one can deduce that they are windows framing the sky, whilst other images may be of snow banks, or the sea, perhaps with mist, or the imprecision of a photographic time exposure.
However, what they are – whether graphite drawings or photographs, or even what they are images of – is of secondary importance to how they are. They are tenuous.
As clouds, mist, snow, or blurred moving water the surfaces under consideration are barely ‘captured’, or at best, slight notated as fleeting states of affairs. They are citations of tenuity, lacking as they do, substance, or solidarity. Their thinness and scant perceptibility is most obvious in the relationship that is maintained with their boundaries. Edges are only established in order to bring themselves into question.
If the images are tenuous, then so is their form of presentation. Where the images are located on the paper is approximate. The photographs ‘anchor’ the centre of the page but are indeterminate in terms of where they stop or start vertically, and the drawings are anchored by an almost indiscernible grid to the paper that supports them and that either they fade into or emerge from. The work is suspended by clips from stretched wires, and is viewed against walls comprised of different surfaces. The paper curves slightly and casts shadows; it carries its images but is still allowed materiality in our space, even if it is a vulnerable materiality. The size of the sheet of paper, whether large or small, never lets the viewer forget that it is a material; a material bearing an image and suspended in front of a wall as an insubstantial intervention in our space. The openness of the material to the viewer, it’s vulnerability, has a direct bearing on one’s perception of the work and it’s meaning.
Temporality and contingency come together in the moment of the artwork, in one’s encounter with the artwork, to reinforce the tenuousness of that encounter. An encounter in which one is pointedly reminded of our own tentative presence and attempts at making sense of what is before us physically and by implication.
*Edmund Jabes, The Beginning of the Book, in The Book of Dialogue, Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
John Penny
"Waterlines" Review
Posted on: 12.18.07
Two concepts jump to mind upon viewing Elena Volkova’s site-responsive Airscapes: escaping the cliché and sculpting space. As in her other photographic series, which study land and water, the subject is a natural element. Taken from an airplane, the aerial images begin as beautiful sunsets, but are transformed into Taoist musings on nothingness: The sky’s blazing palette dissolves into the palest blues and pinks, and eventually, white. Barely perceptible, the clouds’ swirls and puffs in turn frame vast expanses of sky. Some of the Airscapes hang as extended scrolls, their vertical inclination stressing the human body, and their extreme length, infinity; others emphasize the horizontality of landscape; and still others play off the grid of a window. Besides experimenting with format, Volkova manipulates the edges, with some passages bleeding into the white of the paper. What remains are representations of the void as possibility or fullness, not gloom or emptiness, ethereal interstices where perception and imagination converge.
Sarah Tanguy, Curator
ART in Embassies Program, and independent curator and critic