Lesia Khomenko

For her series, Lesia Khomenko collaborated with students from Kyiv Academy of Media Arts’ ‘Contemporary Art’ course, where she is a tutor. Yet it is difficult to call this joint effort a collaboration, since the artist works from photographs that were sent by her students in response to her request. She didn’t directly involve them in the process. Throughout this process, Khomenko studies her own identity and identities of young artists. While working with their portraits, the artist transforms her attitude towards her students: instead of analyzing them as young artists subjects, which are in the same coordinate system as her, Khomenko objectifies them, relying not on her personal opinion, but solely on the images that they have sent.

Deconstruction in Lesia Khomenko’s practice requires not only working with visual imagery, but with all the painting’s components, including its material aspects. Thus, in her new series the artist reaches maximum elasticity of canvas by using synthetic canvas, biflex fabric and synthetic acrylics. This allows the artist to transform one of her favourite processes of mounting canvas onto a frame into the main ‘sense creative’ part, since it becomes an instrument in deformation of depicted figures. Apart from that, the frame itself, as a rule, is left an invisible and a marginal part of the painting. It is often either subjected to replacement, or the process of mounting is carried out without the artist being present. “Lesia Khomenko and her school” project draws viewer’s attention to the monotonous, technical process of producing and framing an artwork, which becomes a self-sufficient artistic gesture, which ultimately determines the image.