Eli Ain / Artificial Landscapes

 

The Artificial Landscapes installation is a conceptual project of the artist Eli Ain, in which her primary goal is to stage a landscape from nature. Directly connected to her two previous projects “Double Coding” and “Foreign Landscapes”, it comprises a unit of exploration of the complex relations nature-art work, culture-nature and art-culture, which for some time now, represents her primary artistic preoccupation.

 

The preoccupation with the spatial relations, objectness and its ability to compose in the space, are best expressed in these three projects.

Unlike in “Double Coding”, where that inspiration is driven by architecture and in “Foreign Landscapes”, where she makes an artistic intervention in the natural landscape, in “Artificial Landscapes”, her inspiration is the nature itself.

 

Ain creates a new, intimate natural ambience using modern artificial materials (several types of plastic) and assembles them together using materials taken directly from nature (branches, soil, moss) in a symbiosis of symbols which should evolve in a natural landscape.

 

For that purpose, on one hand, there are the sculptural graphics or objects, cylindrical in their basis, wrapped with irregularly bent digital prints, which are torn apart and fragmented in several sections with shadows from the tree branch prints.

 

Opposite of them, we have smaller objects, with which the whole process is reversed. Here, the author takes directly from nature (tree branches) and wraps them with mild, semitransparent plastics, in that way changing their natural context and using the light, she creates some new artificial atmosphere.

 

The minimalist tendency towards reduction and simplification of expression, which is noticed throughout all three above-mentioned projects, lead AIN to a totally monochromatic art work in future.

 

In constructing the composition with the objects, the absence of the colourful dynamism is evident, and instead of it, we see a contrast play of black and white, and tendency towards even more reduced coloring. The play, so important in Ain’s artistic expression, we see in the formally composing the objects on site, in which often, the final visual result will depend of the space available to the author. In that way, her main preoccupation with the space, the spatial relations, and the objectness and her profound sense of creation is once again emphasized.

 

On the other hand, the fact that the author makes us see and think of nature inside an art gallery, the trees that are less and less present outside, the natural landscape that changes and disappears daily, is not coincidental and directly affects her artistic expression and the thematic decision, and speaks of a subtle engagement by the author who skilfully avoids her work to turn into an empty political statement, which is such a frequent case in the modern art nowadays.

Boris Krmov