Artist of the month: Oksana
Chepelyk
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Oksana Chepelyk is an emerging artist from Kiev in Ukraine. After her high-school education in Kiev, she continued her art studies in Moscow, Paris and Amsterdam. The major acceptance in the world of visual arts came in 1996. In "Breakfast on the Grass", an installation dedicated to 10 years of the Chernobyl at Luc Quyerel Gallery in Paris, she presented tableware in the grass or on cloth – in some instances with excrements among the dishes. This of cause aroused lots of attention. The other exhibition "Vagabond Island of Lesbos" was presented first in Kiev showing the performance of the transparent plastic air-filled figures – often floating in air and giving the impression of movement. Venus and Lesbos 1 exhibited here in the ArtNetGallery are good examples from the show. Venus is one of the highlights of works by Oksana Chepelyk. |
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In 1996, at the Biennial "Pleins Feux”, CREDAC Contemporary Art Center in Paris, Oksana Chepelyk presented installations made by bed-clothes titled “Landscape” and “Landcol”. She probably while watching someone in bed saw that the bed-clothe might be formed to make landscape or forms that could direct out imagination to a wide spectrum of thought – from the most primitive to the more subtle. Good examples of this are works like Landscape on display in the ArtNetGallery. |
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a series of works titled: "Is
the Clothes a Shelter ?” from 1997. Clothes
both give shelter and conceal from exposure from the surrounding. Especially women
describe that they sometimes feel that they are being undressed by staring eyes, usually
by the opposite sex. In these series of works
Oksana
Chepelyk
presents photos of the naked human body within a transparent frame – the shelter. These works might illustrate how easily we can be
undressed by surrounding imagination. Good
examples of these works are Clothes 1 to 3. |
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In the series “1+1” which have been exhibited both in Europe and in the USA, Oksana Chepelyk displays parts of the human body by mixing pictures of parts of the body – letting the observer imagination join the parts and fill out the empty spaces. Masterly, Oksana Chepelyk manages to make symmetry or balance between images of different parts of the human body. Good examples are Mysteries 1 and 2. |
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In 1998, Oksana Chepelyk presented a photo-series of the human face titled “Evident unavoidable”. Parts of the face that do not cause any special effects when viewed on a photo of the whole face, but when certain parts are pin-pointed, like the lips (Evident2) or eyebrows (Evident1), we automatically might start to think – is my lower lip so large ? or does the form of my eye give the impression that I´m of Asian descent or are my eyebrows unattended ? Although these faces are probably very good looking, however, by focusing on one part of the face Oksana Chepelyk manages to make the viewer automatically think about details of his or her own features.
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Here we only manages to exhibit a handful of installations by Oksana Chepelyk. There are many more. Presently she has been working on digital images and video. A good example of this is the digital image “Boy”on the left from the cycle "Dreamland". This new media has great potentials in combining images with special effects and we look forward to future exhibitions. Saemundur Gudmundsson |
