sunflowers Print

Kateryna Ivonina is Ukrainian artist and she lives in the USA from the end of 2021 "In my artistic practice, I bring to life "eternal" questions, which are contextualised in current cultural circumstances and through the framework of my personal experience. I am interested in the form, figure and act of self-identification, self-consciousness of both the entire human specie and the individual thinking being. Identity is a fundamentally questionable entity, which from a correlationist, Cartesian perspective looks like an unsolvable puzzle. Therefore, as an artist, I turn to the logic of the phenomenologist and seek to discover the features of human identity in the reflection of the optics through which we look at the world of things and phenomena. The anthropomorphisation of non-human forms of life, the narrativisation of what we see, is always an experience of distortion, a sign of blind anthropocentrism. But by deconstructing this experience, we can find an answer to the question of who we are through our intentions, projections, memories and delusions. It is optics that is particularly important to me as an artist. I create my works at the level of the gaze, of perception - tangible and intangible all at once, always somewhere in between, in the midway, both corporeal and imaginary, real and illusionary, abstract and figurative. Here is the basic logic that underlies my artistic practice: nature influences the human being, their creative power and their capacity for self-consciousness. Humans in turn, being under such influence, observe and interpret nature. So the transformations and interpretations of natural forms in human creative and scientific practices are both the source and the consequence of that interaction that is embedded in our genome and that sprouts in our culture. It changes forms and contents, but remains faithful to this dual and balanced pattern of perception and influence. This structure is confusing and bewildering. But at the same time, it gives us the opportunity to examine individual facets and traits of fluid, performative identities through juxtaposition, co-configuration, correlation.I work with visual semiotics and use it as a navigation system - a complex, multilevel construction of the visible and assembled universe, as if reconstructed by humans from elements of tradition, ancestral memory, symbols, avatars and fragments of large and small narratives, from recollection and "peeking" into the future.