Elena Lyakir

COLLECTIONS

Transfigurations of Sorrow explores how color and its symbolism can transform our emotional and mental states. In the early weeks of the war in my homeland, Ukraine, the flag's colors evoked powerful emotions and a strong sense of cultural identity. Blue symbolized the sky, freedom, and serenity, while yellow represented wheat fields, joy, and abundance. Initially, my melancholy tinted my perception with shades of blue and yellow. I sought solace in transforming grief into poetic expression, finding a remedy for the soul through art.

I turned to the beauty of nature for comfort and began to view my photography as a form of chromotherapy. Using gels and crystals as makeshift lens filters, I aimed to alter my inner landscape through abstract and multi-layered expressions of color, creating dreamlike images that hinted at waves of nostalgia.

Through this series, I continue to reflect on nature's healing and grounding power. Nature offers a sense of belonging that transcends borders and flags, a place where color and light become catalysts for transformation and enchantment.

The Shinrin Yoku series draws inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints, seeking to illuminate the enchanting and healing power of the forest. 

Originating in Japan during the 1980s, the term "Shinrin Yoku," meaning "forest bathing," was coined as an antidote to stress for city dwellers and a way to reconnect people with nature. Research in the 1990s began to provide scientific evidence for the physiological benefits of forest bathing, supporting the innate understanding of nature's healing power.

Utilizing a combination of unconventional, almost improvised filters and digital manipulation, the raw images are printed in large-format onto metallic paper with a unique luminous quality, further enhancing their visual impact. Smaller prints are also available, printed on glass via Ceramic Frit process, creating a combination of photography and sculpture.

In this series I attempt to transcend mere representation and create radiant, evocative works of art, using a distinctive combination of techniques and materials.

Ever since encountering flocks of red-winged blackbirds on a chilly autumn morning in eastern Long Island, I've been captivated by their mesmerizing displays. Growing up in Ukraine, birds held deep significance for me, symbolizing freedom, transformation, and hope. Their poetic murmurations evoke a mix of awe, longing, and nostalgia.

Driven by my fascination, I've journeyed to remote corners of the world seeking elusive migrating flocks. Photographing them is a challenge; they are swift, fleeting, and often difficult to find. Yet, I find joy in the process. The quiet moments spent alone, is not only an exercise of patience and awareness, but an opportunity for introspection.

For me, the Aves series has evolved into an exploration of the emotional connection we have with visual experiences. Images, like memories and dreams, are symbolic representations of reality that manifest in the physical world. Through my avian subjects, I aim to engage viewers in self-reflection by evoking memories and facilitating the sensation of feeling. I relish the moments where the visual experience transcends into an emotional one.

It’s a challenge for us to see the natural world as an extension of self, rather than being removed from it as the observer, the curator, the possessor, and the beneficiary. I am fascinated by our visceral relationship to nature and how mystical experiences in nature and by nature do not arise merely from their contents but also in accord with the alternate states of consciousness during which they occur. Those of us living in urban environments mostly see nature for its romantic beauty, which has been cultivated to nurture and inspire us. Man has tamed it into parks, gardens, yards, and farms, yet nature in its essence is fierce and unpredictable, simultaneously terrifying and awe-inspiring, not unlike a spiritual or religious experience. 

When I decided to travel to Iceland, I knew that the landscape was going to be dynamic and evocative, yet nothing prepared me for the astonishment I felt while being immersed in it. The title, Mysterium Tremendum, was conceived during my journey through the wild landscapes, hiking through volcanic lava fields, black river valleys, crumbling kaleidoscopic mountains, and majestic basalt coastal cliffs hovering over the glistening arctic blue of the blustering North Atlantic. Immersed in erratic weather patterns, at times merely uncomfortable, sometimes truly terrifying, and sometimes sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship, a spiritual phenomenon, which seemed to pass over into a lasting attitude of the soul. 

The term, Mysterium Tremendum, was coined by Rudolf Otto, one of the most influential thinkers on theology of the twentieth century. He is best known for his analysis of the experience that, in his view, underlies all spirituality. He calls it "numinous," and it has three components: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. As mysterium, the numinous is "wholly other"—entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes silence and awe. But the numinous is also a mysterium tremendum, which can elicit fright because it presents itself as overwhelming power. Finally, the numinous presents itself as fascinans—alluring, benevolent, and gracious.

The tremendous awe, beauty, and mystery contrasted by the feeling of being alarmingly exposed and insignificant against the magnitude of the landscape in Iceland is the Mysterium Tremendum I attempt to convey with these photographs shot with a tilt-shift lens and makeshift analog filters.

I have long been strongly influenced by natural history dioramas, cabinets of curiosity, ephemera, and other manifestations of humanity’s attempt to categorize, understand, and ultimately control the natural world. 

Shadow Boxes Of Curiosity is a series of large-scale photographs of dioramas from the Museum Of Natural History in New York City, depicting the museum’s extensive collection of animal specimens in their "natural" environments through the lens and asking a question of the times: what is real and what is fake?

As I contemplate these anthropic representations of the natural world, I can’t help but be conflicted with the knowledge of the impact our human activities have made on this planet and how in the age of the Anthropocene and amidst the time of unceasing extinction of hundreds of animal species we continue to simultaneously destroy and attempt to preserve and catalog nature.

The word distance has always produced a visual in my mind’s eye. My association with the word is an emotional one, and transforming emotions into images is what I attempt to do in my work. Distance is not a measurement but a longing for something. The atmospheric colors we see in the abyss of space are not in some place itself but are the colors of the distance between us and what we long for.
The images in the Distance series are both montages and in-camera multi-exposures shot with a tilt-shift lens. Their mythical aesthetic suggests a dreamy semblance of something very familiar and tangible yet simultaneously impossible and remote.
Distance, or distancing, has become a word used so frequently during the Covid-19 pandemic and the practice of distancing that has become necessary to our survival and the new normal. The word distance evokes in me another feeling. One of isolation, alienation, and also of responsibility.
I have spent these cold spring months of the pandemic isolated and immersed in nature and have been in quiet observation of the earth and its creatures slowly emerging from the slumber of winter. Nature remains as it were, and the birds come back in flocks as usual to nest in the forests, making symbols in the ever-changing sky. I spend time alone in the elements at dawn and at dusk to witness and photograph the migration. I am both present and detached, alone and allied with nature. The atmosphere is awash with sound and color. I find deep resonance with this Rebecca Solnit quote: “The color of distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
As I sail my ghost ship through these uncertain times to the shores of the unknown, I don’t know what awaits me, what awaits us collectively, but I often find myself longing to be on the other side of this distance. I long to connect.

As an immigrant, my sense of home is nebulous and obscure, yet it is tender and nostalgic. I feel a sense of devotion to the Ukrainian landscape, where I grew up. Time after time I return to sensations that I have felt there, like a scent or a sound, thus creating a new kind of landscape filled with sentiments and experiences I had collected over time. Landscapes are perpetually altered in memory and become a relative vision perceived through our own filters and the way we remember ourselves in the past. Sentiments often fuse with our surroundings, and we are able to transform one another.

Locus of Memory is a series of in-camera double-exposed images. They are instinctually fused and overlapped in the same way that memories of places are entwined with sentiments transforming one another and always creating new impressions about the past. The internal landscapes we create from memory are often bittersweet with nostalgia, as are the images in this series.

A long-time Brooklynite, I was witness to the inevitable gentrification and real estate overdevelopment, which has dramatically transformed my neighborhood over the last decade. The gradual disappearance of punctuated natural environments has been uncanny. I began taking photographs of still remnant vegetated sites as a form of record. Now and again I would return to several locations I had photographed to observe the transformations. As I watched the ominous green construction fences morphing landscapes and consuming places where, not long ago, thriving flora served as habitat for birds and other urban “wildlife,” I was compelled to explore this subject viscerally. In this ongoing project, I compose in-camera multi-exposures of intimate pockets of nature photographed in and around inner cities to create immersive large-scale panoramas. The abstract visual quality of the double exposure technique echoes nature in constant flux—the result of the human influence on the environment.
The project had expanded to include other cities in the U.S. and around the globe. City Parks Romance photographs aim to transform small vegetated places in city parks into expansive and dreamy landscapes evoking an atmosphere of romance and nostalgia—sentiments we often feel for nature as a result of living in urban environments.

The Singing Lessons photographs were taken with a toy lens on my FujiFilm in Costa Rica in March 2020. Upon my arrival, the U.S. declared a Covid-19 health emergency, drastically changing life as we knew it. I had planned to shoot seascapes and enjoy nature, but the news from home left me feeling disconnected from the magical surroundings. It was as if a filter obscured reality, creating a barrier between me and the world. The once-beautiful landscapes now felt surreal, like artificial dioramas.

My work has always explored how perception shapes our surroundings; the aesthetic atmosphere is often influenced by mood. However, this new phenomenon was unique, almost spellbinding. After hiding out in the mountains for a few days, I was ready to leave when birds suddenly appeared, singing. I took it as a sign to learn something new and went home to take singing lessons.

The Meditations series uses minimal landscapes to create opportunities for quiet contemplation and receptivity, inspired by Rumi's quote, “The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” Our daily lives and thoughts are often chaotic, and we believe we are accomplishing things, but in reality, we are overlooking many subtle, important details in ourselves and our surroundings. The simplicity of the visual experience in this series aims to encourage reflection on our complexities with kindness, allowing us to feel more deeply and see with more clarity both internally and externally. By creating space, we open ourselves to life's gifts.

The Portraits series reimagines traditional portrait photography by substituting wild raptors for human subjects. This challenges the ethics of observation, questioning what we have the right to see. The captured creatures are photographed as if posing, unable to object to the exploitative nature of photography or comprehend how they are perceived by the human eye. Portraiture transforms subjects into objects, allowing the photographer to see them in ways they cannot see themselves.

In the winter of 2009, I was invited to the New York City Museum of Natural History to view their extensive collection of bird specimens, housed in the basement storage facility. The experience had a profound and immediate effect on me, producing conflicting emotions about nature and humanity's attempts to understand it.

From a personal perspective, the Skins series is a form of self-expression through photography. In 1990, as communism in Ukraine was ending, my family fled to the U.S. seeking political asylum. Due to my deep connection with diaspora and displacement, I understand the feeling of being an outsider. Skins is a symbolic reflection of this experience, as well as the thoughts and emotions that accompany it. The resulting photographs fascinate me; there is a kind of beauty in the images of lifeless birds in a tranquil, captive state, with hollow eyes and extended claws, tagged and arranged in rows. These images evoke feelings of nostalgia and intrigue regarding nature's cycle of life and death. The Skins series is a testament to the relentless passage of time, as well as life's fragility and impermanence.