Alexey Mandych (portfolio)
REVOLUTION IS INTERNAL (2011) (idea and realisation - Alex Mandych, drawings - Misha Levin) Video (0:49) viral marketing Almost every religion gives breathing an important role as a tool for spiritual growth and inner development. Breathing is one of the few functions of our body, which can be performed either automatically or consciously. Concentration on the breath, prevailed against all internal and external distractions, allows to get rid of the custom to response and react. That means to stop acting reactively, and to begin to understand and manage yourself, your "I". This change IS liberation, and IS freedom. So breathing is a necessary and sufficient tool, weapon of liberation. As long as you breathe - you are out of control. The most radical, the final revolution is inside you. BREATHE!
YOU ARE POETRY (2011) Serie of collages There is saying Fidel is poetry meaning romantics of freedom, new chances and future. First it was planned as installation - number of vertical stands with images of well or less known revolutionaries - Ernesto Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Subcomandante Marcos and others. The idea is to put visitor, and first of all - author, inside hero s clothing and feel as if in their place - able to guide, to drive, ready to change something - may be something small, something close to you. If you can wake up in a different place - why you can t wake up a different person?
RED MACHINE (2011) 2 images, object From ancient times a man inhabited unknown with possible. So different creatures were arised and places, which could exist, and, possibly, exist. So for outside world there should be someone, who will explain the world an interpreter. The one who will explain everything objects and events around. So maps, pictures, paintings, songs and myths where born. At some stage exploration and registration of the world around were given to mechanisms and instruments. But explanation or interpretation is still necessary for understanding and perception of the world around us. And almost the same example wooden toy truck is not a real, fully functional vehicle. It is just a reflection of some kind of real one, and becomes an automobile only after interpretation. Also - red one.
DEN DANSANDE STJÄRNAN (DANCING STAR) (2011) Street-art Graffiti 7m x 4m Mariestad, Sweden My project is the part of mural project for the whole wall, which was given by the city. I always wanted to work on an open place and always wanted to create dialogue or to talk with people passing by. My part looked like place for a engineering draft with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra" "I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star." and permission to draw over the painting. My intension was to create space free of restrictions, borders and bureaucracy, and to challenge people to dare to draw over, and to imply this chaos on the wall. And I wanted to use permission we have to draw on the wall and to share it with citizens - to create oasis of chaos and selfexpression. (Some time passed after I left and the wall was overdrawn - and they sent me video of this happening)
SHAMAN S DRUM (2011) sand, gravel, feathers, texts - all found "Man's life is like a matchbox. To treat it seriously - ridiculous. To treat it lightly - dangerous" Ryūnosuke Akutagawa "Shaman's drum is the most important tool for moving shaman from human world to spirit world. It is used as a bird (or moose, or deer, or goat), transporting shaman, and also as a map, for shaman not to get lost in the spirit world. Drum's sound gets shaman into excitation, which takes him into trance - "lovi" - еcstasy, finished by loss of consciousness. Literally "lovi" means the crack between worlds - Heaven, Human world and Underworld. This crack is the gate to Manala (sacred river, surrounding Underworld of Dead - Yambi Aymo)" A. Demkin "Mythological by it's nature, Golden Age doctrine couldn't be rationally explained or interpreted. Methodology of primitive consciousness - rationalism refusal (and often - refusal of any linguistic and symbolic structures). Primitivism is as a project intentionallly, expressly paradoxical - as an attempt of creating base under the myth, refusing science, ratio and arguments" M. Verbitsky
DIVISION (2013) (solo, Open Gallery) Video, ready-made, objects, sculpture Series of works illustrate artist period of life, when he broke hand, and then back to full health. To get from one state to another - you need to perform some actions, as in time, so in space. Works are generalized, free from details, just not to get away from main point - time flow and system of it, which we make ourselves. From gallery site: «The artist make an ambitious attempt to materialize the notions of time and space, which means an attempt to give a tangible image of irreversibility of the time running and to demonstrate the space in its pure sense space as such. In order to make this idea possible, various manoeuvres and mechanisms will be used as well as live situations, which allow the artists to record precisely the change of hours and days. Moreover, the spectators will also be involved in this rigorous pursuit»
DESTRUCTION (2013) (Project, in co-authorship with Alex Korsi) Wooden furniture, performance The point of this project is a discourse of two artists about the meaning of destruction and its connection with creation. Our life is a constant opposition of destruction and creation. Interaction between those two is the life as it is. The project is a constantly running performance when artists demolish the set up of a room (furniture and light sources), and afterwards - pedantically glue things together, and then destroy them again. At some point furnishing stops being furniture and even like part of mode of life. The aim of the of the project is to find out this slight difference between the object and its absence, between existence and disappearance.
99 (2014) (Business centre «D-plaza») Knives, steel cable Toughness, and even cruelty of modern day business, pathological impossibility to combine humaneness and effectiveness, drives an office worker to a state where he is constantly pressed, almost fearful and depressed. Somewhere on the boundary of consciousness, a constantly blinking danger - not to be on time, not to be able to accomplish, not to please The System. This work visualises this sensation of constant anxiety and danger, which stays right on the edge of perception (may be there is - may be there is not), oftenly camouflages into something bright and beautiful (knives give really nice patches of reflected light when sun falls on them). And only working with someones awareness gives him a path to liberation.
GLYPHS (2014) (Kronstadt, St. Petersburg, Russia) Black cardboard Those stencils work like masks for Museum of Kronstadt history spotlights, giving back to its walls iconic images of town life. Like man from the prehistoric times tried to trace and fixate signs of his life and to conquer them this way, same here - artist conjures life and its signs.
ANIMAL FARM SYMPHONY (2015) (Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia) Casio watches, metal, wood, plexiglas In this project clocks have been made absolutely identical, with the same technology, but they are not identical they are unique, distinctive. All 60 clocks will be synchronized and will read the exact same time. There will be a signal every hour, and an alarm will sound at noon. Visually and technologically these clocks are identical. But each clock has its own inherent faults. The more they run the more apparent this becomes. Over time, the signals will begin to diverge, and that chirp will begin to line up as a kind of melody, the Animal Farm Symphony.
BLACK SQUARE (2015) (Private collection, Moscow, Russia) Canvas, primer, blood (79,5 см Х 79,5 см) Square, painted with red blood, slowly darkens and has already turned from the bright pink colour to the dark brown. Gradually it will become Black, what will in time connect it with its great predecessor. First of all, as it turned out, it became an illustration of this proclamation, prophecy of the coming darkness. In blackness, the unknown what we fear the most is not the absence of light and losing the path and its guidelines, we are mainly afraid of suffering, blood and pain. We are afraid that everything is just getting worse. Lost, shaking and limited, we want first of all the appearance of light, hope, understanding, but instead we get the fear, extinction and oblivion. Red square is a symbol of yearning, fear of death and emptiness, invariably turns black, a symbol of the connection between the beginning and the end in art forms, and the inevitable finiteness of creativity in each form, what is the end of the subject, the end of fear, the end of everything.