Svetlana Talanova

PhotoSynthesis (2021) explores the organic nature of photography and of the world. Produced in the darkroom without a camera, using translucent natural materials, the work continues the tradition of art and nature. Speaking to the conditions of being, this work is a physical embodiment of the natural world and of light.

PhotoSynthesis considers the importance of reconnecting with nature in a world where such external interactions have been constrained. It considers the essential yet fragile nature of the organic world.

My work connects with the idea of multidimensionality: not quite flat, yet not quite 3D, not quite fixed in time but not quite moving either. 

My research embraces Western and Eastern philosophy as well as Abstract Expressionism, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy as well as practical experimentation and the “Slow Living” movement. Slowness is a counterpoint to the prevailing world view that life inevitably moves ever quicker. My work celebrates slowness and even meditates on it. I slow down time dramatically in the process of making a print, allowing the image to mature itself and develop. 

Though the use of abstraction I explore how photography can represent the unseen, and in turn to explore what we see and don’t see. I am concerned with the representation of meaning within the photograph and how abstraction can tell a story. 

I am interested in what happens when multiple layers of different experiences superpose on top of each other – how one experience may disappear as another emerges. I see this as reflective of our identities, which evolve with time and place and experience. Through layering multiple experiences that occur in multiple times and speeds on top of one another in a way that they sometimes contradict each other, I intend to reveal hidden structures of the world, exploring and revealing this huge range of coexistences.

The work reveals traces of its lived experience, machinery and the artist’s hand, questioning the boundaries of photography, its intersection with painting and sculpture and the use of abstraction to access the subconscious.