NEW YORK, NY.- The Highline Loft presents Punctuated History, an exhibition of work from New York based artist Elena Lyakir. Punctuated History combines selected photography from the artist's ongoing series with new large-scale photographs from her recent series Dreams, inspired by Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation Of Dreams.
Using nature as her primary subject, Lyakir pushes the photographic medium to suggest the illusion of charcoal drawings and painterly abstractions. In Dreams, Lyakir continues with avian subject matter of past series while exploring how dreams reveal themselves in the physical world, asserting meaning into the waking life; an aesthetic window into a dream world that is poetic, contemplative, and haunting through images filled with texture, energy, and movement.
Growing up in communist Ukraine, Elena Lyakir developed a passion for photography as a young child. When she was seven, old family photographs and Russian cinematography inspired her to pick up a camera. In 1990, when she was 16, she immigrated to the U.S. with her family, seeking political asylum.
The photographs of Punctuated History are a physical testament to the sentiments of Lyakir’s personal history shown through visual metaphors of poetic longing, melancholy, dreams and other complexities of the human condition. The images involve the viewer through self-reflection by evoking memory, facilitating the sensation of feeling, and confronting the awareness of their own state of being.
In addition, the photography exhibition features a collection of bold, organic furniture and sculpture of Brooklyn-based artist and designer Eric Slayton.
Slayton is attracted to the symmetry of bold industrial sourced materials such as the thick steel plates, form cast concrete columns, and structural wood beams which are used to make the skeleton of the urban landscape. He combines these rough textures with more refined elements of polished bronze, mirrored stainless steel, glass, aluminum, and animal suede. The resulting pieces are honest and confrontational, and have a very distinctive quality that is well described by a Japanese term Wabi Sabi, which roughly translates to “beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” Each piece is truly unique with it’s minimal simplicity and design, accenting the richness of tones and textures inherent in the material pallet. His work matures gracefully with time representing the change that is incessantly taking place in nature and in life itself.
Slayton’s background is in Conservation Biology and Ornithology. He says: “ I feel that I came to my creative expression as an outsider.” Yet his knowledge of materials and the beauty he finds within their state of continuous change is evident due to his lifelong study of Nature.polished cast
