Epoxy resin, dried flowers
There are many questions humanity can not answer with the use of science and technology, while metaphysical and religious answers don’t seem convincing, too. Probably, the reason for it is in the dual essence of our reality.
Our world consists of physical and metaphysical layers, like two sides of one coin. Each person, as a part of this dual world, combines the material and spiritual in himself (herself), and the artist believes that each object in our energy-informational reality should have the same structure. The statement sounds logical, but it cannot be proved with the use of science and technologies.
Elen Alien thinks that if it is impossible to find the answer using common methods and modern technologies, there is always a way to ask our ancestors referring to ancient beliefs of different cultures. And there was a pre-scientific idea of primitive people about the spirit existing in everyobject called animism. In 21st century, people came back to the similar ideas in the Heidegger-influenced school of thought ‘Object-oriented ontology’ that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.
The artwork “Souls” is created from dry flowers symbolizing a body, a material part of reality, and epoxy resin representing its metaphysical part (soul or energy). We usually think of the soul in the context of death. For example, during funeral ceremonies, when we see the soulless body, it is very strange and unusual to see just a physical shell of the person. Usually, we can not hold this type of one-sided reality, we don’t understand this change, it’s hard to accept it, and we cry.
Elen Alien’s artistic force is the ability to transform pain into beauty. In this artwork, I have connected the image of flowers, traditionally brought to funeral ceremonies, and the image of tears, falling down on the ground as a physical part of us driven by nonmaterial force, for the viewer to have the appropriate mood to start thinking of life and death.
If the viewer takes one piece of the composite artwork and places it in front of the white wall, for it to play with the sunbeams, (s)he will see how the spiritual part of the piece (represented as a translucent drop or puddle) creates the beautiful shadow on the wall, but (s)he can not see the body of flower in this reflection.
This amazing fact is an example for the viewer to see the beauty of changes, the magic of reincarnation, to suppose that if (s)he doesn’t see somebody represented in the physical layer of our world, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist at all. The author aimed to change the viewer’s optic, and make him(her) believe that the reality could be different from what we used to think about it, that there is plenty of things we cannot explain or percepted, but it does not mean that these things are not important.
