Elena Lyakir

COLLECTIONS

Transfigurations Of Sorrow is a meditation on the ways color and its symbolism can transform our emotional and mental states. In the early weeks of the war in my homeland, the Ukrainian flag was a powerful symbol and evoked a sense of cultural identity and myriad of emotions. Blue symbolizes the sky, freedom and serenity and yellow; wheat fields, joy and abundance. Initially, in my melancholy, I saw everything in shades of blue and yellow and looked for ways to transform grief into poetic expression as a kind of remedy for the soul. Infallibly, I turned to the beauty of Nature and began to see my work with a camera as a kind of chromotherapy. I used gels and crystals as makeshift lens filters in an attempt to alter my inner landscape through paradisal abstractions of color and multi exposures, suggesting layered waves of nostalgia. Working on this series I continue to reflect on Nature as a healing and grounding element and a place of belonging devoid of borders and flags, where color and light exist as catalysts for transformation and enchantment.

The term Shinrin Yoku, “forest bathing”, emerged in Japan in the 1980s. The purpose of this practice was to offer an antidote to stressed out city dwellers and inspire people to reconnect with the country’s forests. In the 1990s, researchers began studying the physiological benefits of forest bathing, providing the science to support what we innately know: nature is healing.

Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, Ukiyo-e, and the radiant energy of trees, Shinrin Yoku series attempts to illuminate their enchanting and healing power through a unique process of makeshift filters and digital manipulation. The images in this series are printed on ¾” glass panels in three different sizes using ceramic frit process. The resulting works are a combination of photograph and sculpture and can be displayed in ways that use a light source to illuminate the image.

In the early hours of a cold autumn morning I encountered large flocks of red-winged blackbirds in eastern Long Island. Watching the birds feed and fly in unison, I was mesmerized. Thus began my obsession with the subject. Growing up in Ukraine I had a strong visceral connection to birds. They were symbols of freedom, transformation and hope and their poetic murmurations evoke simultaneous feelings of awe, longing and nostalgia.
I have traveled to many remote places across the globe in search of illusive migrating flocks. They are a challenge to photograph; fast and fleeting, they are often difficult to find and easy to lose sight of but I enjoy the process. The quiet time I spend alone listening to the sounds of nature is not only an exercise of patience and awareness, but an opportunity for introspection.
For me, the Aves series has become an ongoing exploration of how we relate to the visual experience emotionally. Images represent reality in symbols. Like memories and dreams, they reveal themselves in the physical world, asserting meaning into the activities of life. Using birds as my subject, I attempt to engage the viewer through self-reflection by evoking memory and facilitating the sensation of feeling. I relish the moments in which the visual experience becomes 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, majestic basalt coastal cliffs hovering over glistening arctic blue of the blustering North Atlantic. Immersed in erratic weather patterns, at times merely uncomfortable, sometimes truly terrifying and some 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 alarmedly 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 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, have become words 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 now 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 – a result of the human influence on the environment and the age of Anthropocene.
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.

Singing Lessons is a series of photographs that were shot with a toy lens on my Fuji in Costa Rica, March 2020. The day I arrived there, U.S. declared a Covid-19 health emergency as the pandemic ravaged the world and stopped life in its tracks. I intended to shoot a series of sea scopes while taking pleasure in being in nature but when the news from home arrived I felt unhinged. Suddenly there was a disconnection between me and this magical place, as if there was a filter obscuring reality and everything became like a view outside the window separating me from the world. My beautiful surroundings became surreal, like I was looking at human-made dioramas instead of real landscapes. In my work I have always explored the idea of how we perceive our surroundings through our respective filter, the aesthetic atmosphere often depends on a given mood, yet this new phenomenon I found myself in was unprecedented, like being under a spell. I was hiding out in the mountains for a few days and when I was ready to leave the birds came out of nowhere bringing their song. It was a sign, I thought. It’s time to learn something new. So I went home and took singing lessons.

“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear”, said Rumi. The minimal landscapes in the Meditations series serve as an opportunity for receptivity and quiet contemplation. Our daily existence is often very chaotic and so is the incessant chatter in our minds. We think we are accomplishing things but in truth we are missing out on so many subtle, important details in ourselves and our surroundings. In this series I am seeking to explore how simplicity of the visual experience might allow us to reflect on our complexities with kindness, to feel deeper and to see with more clarity inside and out. When we allow room for more space we open up to life’s gifts.

The Portraits series explores traditional portrait photography by focusing on wild raptors in place of human subjects. To take a portrait of someone is to see them in a way they have never seen themselves, turning subjects into objects. The captured creatures are photographed as if posing for the camera. They cannot object to the exploitative nature of photography, and they do not understand the ways in which they are being perceived by the human eye. These portraits question the ethics of seeing, asking what we have the right to observe.

In winter 2009 I was invited to the Museum of Natural History in New York City to view the extensive specimen bird collection in their storage facility located in the basement of the museum building. The experience had a profound effect on me immediately, creating conflicted emotions about nature and the human effort to understand it.
From a personal perspective, the Skins series is a kind of self-expression through the lens. In 1990 when communism in Ukraine was nearing its end, my family fled for the U.S. in search of political asylum. Because of my deep associations with diaspora and displacement, I understand what it feels like to stand apart, or to assume the role of an outsider. Skins is a symbolic reflection of this experience, the thought processes, and emotions that follow it.
What fascinates me about the resulting photographs is the beauty found in images of lifeless fowl in a placid, captive state with eyes hollowed and claws extended, tagged and lined in rows. They evoke feelings of nostalgia and intrigue about nature’s course of life and death. The Skins series is a testimony to time’s relentless melt and life’s fragility and impermanence.