Shaltai Editions presents a new project "Light heaviness and other ways to worry about art" - the result of a study of the possibility of a dialogue between two spaces in which art lives, offline and online, with the participation of three contemporary artists — Alexander Kutovoy, Boris Orlov and Alexander Povzner.
Always engaged in experimenting with the possibilities that old and new technologies give and with the forms that art in copies can take, Shaltai Edition has embarked on the task of starting a dialogue between works made to be accessed offline and works made to be accessed online only. Comparing and contrasting the physicality peculiar of the "hard" place and its absence in the "immaterial" territory perennially connected to the internet have been the starting point in this project. Three sculptors have simultaneously followed their artistic curiosity into both spaces and have come up with their solutions on how these two “natures” can be engaged in a dialogue.
Boris Orlov, Alexander Povzner, and Alexander Kutovoy belong to different generations. Their coming of age as an artist belongs to different historical stages of Russian (and Soviet) contemporary art. Respectively, the beginning of unofficial art in the Soviet Union, the rapid conversion from communism to capitalism that followed the collapse of the USSR, and a certain political and social sameness of post-Soviet times.
All three artists have in common a strictly academic education and a strong predilection for sculpture when materializing their artistic credo. It is through their long experience and mastery in working with three dimensions and making physical objects that these artists have entered the boundless and depthless territory of the Web. Each artist has produced a work for the offline world which has a material and touchable presence - metal, glass, and paper - and one for the one which is accessible only through the help of a digital machine connected to the internet - an animation, mask for photos, and a 3D sculpture. These two works are the result of the artists’ attempts at finding their bond between two spaces so different in nature but so dependent on one from the other. A print on metal is then gifted with movement, a glass object is turned into an effect when taking digital pictures, and a silkscreen acquires virtual depth. The resulting “couples” are two sides of the same coin. They illustrate the way art that has a physical body can “talk about art” with art that belongs to the intangible cyberspace.
