Anna Pobedina: Vision
© Anna Pobedina
Curator’s Statement: Imagenation
The work of Ukrainian artist Anna Pobedina offers a challenge to the viewer in reading her images as a collective visual text. Her work in this exhibition is comprised of multiple exposed images (photomontage) presented in a linear sequential format. Anna Pobedina’s exhibition is built upon two elements: First, two images assembled to form one in the tradition of the montage. Second, the combined experience over time and space; time through which to mediate and experience the collective exhibition, and space referring to the location of the viewer/reader (online, a book or on the walls of a gallery – each bringing its own contextual and informational environment) and their psychological frame.
Assembling images to create a new one, that does not exist external to our imagination, is psychological by nature and is not new to the world of photography. From the early decades of photography image-makers built images out of image combinations. For example: In the 1870s Henry Peach Robinson (image to left) combined 5 negatives to create an imaged titled “Fading Away”. In the same early period Oscar Gustave Rejlander became know for his photomontages.
Later the work of László Moholy-Nagy (1920-40s) and other artist at the Bauhaus School (Germany and the United States) experimented with the emerging technologies and image production. The print became a surface (as does the monitor now) for the imagination.
In the 1960s the work of Jerry Uelsmann, best known for his darkroom manipulation technique, would combine a number of images in the darkroom using various techniques, at times moving a sheet of photo paper through five enlargers set with different images to produce one final image. (I had the honor of being his lab assistant in 1968 when he visited SUNY College at Buffalo, NY, USA. And was taken with his process and thinking.)
With the advent of digital photography and image manipulation tools photographers are able to efficiently combine and manipulate images. The work of Anna Pobedina emerges out of this rich history of image production.
What is crucial in this exhibition is the “reading” of her work. From a reader perspective each individual image, combined with another, is codified, creating a third image of the mind; the readers imagination. (I have suggested in the past that all images are products of the imagination, existing only in the mind of the viewer.) This third image, which only exists in our imagination, is the result of the reading of both images as one. The combination of two representations or signs creates what is termed as an emblem. In that way the photomontage is emblematic, a third representation out of the combination of two. For example, Pobedina’s image of the object wrapped by two bands appear to hold or restrain it, when combined with the image of a women’s naked body it creates a third meaning. The reader reads the two images as one, a combination of the restrictive bands and the human form. (There is also a figure-ground play with all of her images. Seeing two while understanding one.)
This appears to be a uniting theme in her work exhibited: restriction and restraint. Behind bars or decorated with objects, the women’s body is associated with the sensual and domination, not free but limited, a place for decorations.
It is important to step back and realize that you are not experiencing a single image (the combination of two in the montage) but a sequence of images creating an imaginary total image – the idea of the work. The associative spaces between each image (created by pages in a book, images on a wall or as in the VASA format) can create an image or thought that emerges from the combination of her images. Like film, the space between each frame creates an image that is the result of both prints and their frame of references. The viewer of the sequence, the spaces between images, begins to construct associations within space and time. At points the viewer may return to earlier images to confirm the “idea or imaginary image” they are creating. What is happening here, as in other exhibitions, is a complex reading, or decoding and encoding, the range of images and the construction of imagined meaning as a result. I am using the term “imagination” to suggest that the images are not real but only exist with the experience of the viewer (or reader).
I would add to this construct the social and historical context for the artist, as author, and viewer as reader (it could be reduced to the notions of construction and deconstruction of a social text) and the work experienced. The work or text is the surface of experience. The reader experiences the image/text and not its original author. As the author creates meaning the viewer also creates meaning out of the experience. A viewer grounded in fine art or gender studies, or socially engaged in culture of Eastern Europe would yield different imagined images and meanings from another viewer grounded in another time or culture. Consider the historical and social range of imagined meanings produced by viewers who differ as a result of their social and political identity.
The constructed imagined meaning(s) of a visual experience is partly a result of reader’s social and historical location. The experience of the exhibition may or may not reproduce the intentions of the artist or author, intentions do not matter at this point, only the reading of the experienced image as code to be read and its imagined reconstruction.
The end result is the exhibition.
© Roberto Muffoletto, 2022