Installation views from Mikhail Shevelkin: Paintings and Drawings
At the Institute Library, New Haven, CT
January - March 2017
institutelibrary.org/gallery/
At the Institute Library, New Haven, CT
January - March 2017
institutelibrary.org/gallery/
Mikhail Shevelkin’s work exemplifies the often-unrecognized forms of reflections/reflexivity as they materialize through medium. Each year, Mikhail spends about one month camping in Truro, Cape Cod: one of the furthest-reaching landmasses into the Atlantic Ocean on the continental United States. There, Mikhail rises at dawn and walks several miles into the dunes, where he creates thousands of ink drawings. What results is the closest Mikhail has come to representing—a reflection—of the innermost and the outermost, that which is here and there, everywhere and nowhere. This concept exists in many forms and is marked with many names including Zero, the absolute, the plane-point, the sphere, vibration, and even God. Relying on his intuition and the many years of technical proficiency embedded in his artist’s hand, Mikhail is often able to relinquish all control over the process, allowing for complete non-consciousness. However, Mikhail identifies the moment when he tunes into the work through the slightest conscious manipulation as the obliteration and nullification of form. In addition to the twenty-one drawings exhibited here, a classical group in its aesthetic and beauty, Mikhail also draws the abstract form in various styles: grotesque, amorphous, slight, simplistic, flat, illusory, multi-dimensional.
Although Mikhail constantly works toward minimizing the multitude of pacemakers that inundate our lives, the impulse of our surrounding ecology is nevertheless a constant factor in his work. Taking nearly all influences into consideration, Mikhail makes careful considerations of every aspect related to the creation of a drawing, painting, sculpture, or ceramic. For Mikhail, the medium he chooses to convey an idea through visual representation is foremost a translator, an in-between factor: hence the more archaic etymology of “medium” referring to middle states and reflected in the shaman, psychic’s, or oracle’s very being. Grasping the singular brush, Mikhail’s vision is materialized on the picture plane in infinite points through the multitude of the brush’s bristles as the formal reflection/reflexivity. Mikhail recognizes the particularities of each tool he uses and each moment he abides in throughout the entire process of translation-creation. He makes his own paintbrushes (as done and inspired by Willem de Kooning), soaks his own paper (achieving something similar to Chinese rice paper), formats his own canvases, chooses every position and point to sit in for each singular work, and so forth. To achieve the neutral and cold tone, Mikhail uses Higgin’s eternal black, the only ink that does not turn brown upon contact with the paper.
Deep within each drawing pulsates a holistic world, a world existing in constant reflection/reflexivity between the infinite dualities—those we believe are concrete realities.
-Maria Shevelkina
For Mikhail Shevelkin: Paintings and Drawings in the 2nd floor gallery of the Institute Library, New Haven CT
January-March 2017
Although Mikhail constantly works toward minimizing the multitude of pacemakers that inundate our lives, the impulse of our surrounding ecology is nevertheless a constant factor in his work. Taking nearly all influences into consideration, Mikhail makes careful considerations of every aspect related to the creation of a drawing, painting, sculpture, or ceramic. For Mikhail, the medium he chooses to convey an idea through visual representation is foremost a translator, an in-between factor: hence the more archaic etymology of “medium” referring to middle states and reflected in the shaman, psychic’s, or oracle’s very being. Grasping the singular brush, Mikhail’s vision is materialized on the picture plane in infinite points through the multitude of the brush’s bristles as the formal reflection/reflexivity. Mikhail recognizes the particularities of each tool he uses and each moment he abides in throughout the entire process of translation-creation. He makes his own paintbrushes (as done and inspired by Willem de Kooning), soaks his own paper (achieving something similar to Chinese rice paper), formats his own canvases, chooses every position and point to sit in for each singular work, and so forth. To achieve the neutral and cold tone, Mikhail uses Higgin’s eternal black, the only ink that does not turn brown upon contact with the paper.
Deep within each drawing pulsates a holistic world, a world existing in constant reflection/reflexivity between the infinite dualities—those we believe are concrete realities.
-Maria Shevelkina
For Mikhail Shevelkin: Paintings and Drawings in the 2nd floor gallery of the Institute Library, New Haven CT
January-March 2017