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Experience the Information Age in Layered Sculpture Collages

Pavel Kiselev makes works about perception, information, and interaction.
All images courtesy the artist

From the traditional museum stroll, to our online scroll of a blog, how do we take in art? These mixed-media methods are explored in Pavel Kiselev's new exhibit at Triumph GalleryNew Message: Postimage, which features 12 new works by the artist. The series is “about information, its filtering and transformation in a space of infinite generation of new messages and reproduction of images,” Kiselev tells The Creators Project.

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For the last couple years, Kiselev has been collecting various media from the internet as a basis for the sculpture-collages. In the piece New Message: Bad Connection, there is a direct link to viewing and filtering visual content on the internet. Kiselev says, “When you have a bad internet connection, the images are downloaded like colored rectangles without a plot. Any image can be minimized in content, leaving only the general color. This is how images are filtered. The picture becomes abstraction and vice versa.”

By taking the images out of context and mixing them together, he creates hybrid situations and messages. The layered construction affects the perception of the images and becomes itself the medium. It also serves as an interrogation of the significance of copied images: can a copied image be just as impactful as the original, if not more?

Each work is meant to be interpreted in three overlapping ways: immediately as a visual object that is then informed by the artist statement, and further connected to a recorded sound available for listening at the exhibition.

New Message: No New Messages is an accumulated noise, thickening mass, engulfing you in its obscurity. Recently, there's almost no good news, and sometimes there is a feeling that the world is falling into the abyss. There are no new messages because nothing and no one is left," he says. “At the same time, awareness of the future gives us an opportunity to change it. This work is about the present, warning, and hope.”

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When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90s, Russia and its neighboring countries were flooded with new information from the outside world. Suddenly, the region was forced to take part economically, socially, and artistically in a global community they had spent decades isolating themselves from. This is the atmosphere in which Kiselev grew up. He was born in 1984 and spent his childhood enjoying things like collecting coins, sticker albums, and fishing. Then video games appeared, as did computers and the internet, all of which were eagerly absorbed by the Russian population. At 14 years old, Kiselev became part of the newly emerging graffiti scene. At a time when everything was being advertised, this method of expression seemed natural to him—it excited him to know that his name was seen by hundreds of people on the street every day. Since then, Kiselev has worn many hats: he’s been a poet, a musician, a banker, and now he is focusing again on visual art.

"The piece New Message: The Witness is a collection of newspaper articles, a two-month sample of news from different countries, which in fact cover the same events, but interpret them according to the source. Mixing in a chaotic manner, the message becomes a puzzle without the rules of assembly, it allows the infinite finding of new meanings,” Kiselev says.

Kiselev’s pieces are textual abstraction. The text and image are mixed and change places depending on the viewer’s perspective, nationality, and language of origin. Check out more of his works below:

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For more information, visit Pavel Kiselev’s website.

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