The modern world encourages isolation.
The communication revolution of Facebook and iPhones has led to people making friends through computer screens and walking around with headphones stuffed in their ears. Comfortable (or stuck) in our own familiar world, we tend to build artificial barriers that cut short our interaction with the space – people, things, ourselves – around us.
Lyiv sculptor Nazar Bilyk’s “Borders of Space” exhibition at Bottega Gallery in Kyiv challenges the visitor to think about his own borders and the struggle to overcome them, open up and communicate with the world around him.
Artist Nazar Bilyk
“A person can’t be separate from what surrounds him and continually interacts with his environment,” Bilyk, 30, said at the opening on Sept. 17. “The exhibition provokes questions rather than providing answers. A person stands and looks [at the works] and asks who he is, where he is, and how he feels in the space.”
Bilyk uses a variety of materials – glass, plastic, bronze – to create visions of space and ask what our relationship to it is. Do we create our surroundings, our own barriers, or are they imposed? How do we react to them?
Sometimes the space is oppressive – “There” is an armless figure whose torso and head are encased in a plastic box – at others it opens up possibilities, such as “Direction,” where a figure strides upward into open space.
Direction’ figure seems ready to experience the open space.
Emotional and psychological borders and interactions become physical ones in the sculptures.
The exhibition begins with three large figures. The first is the cast used to make the other two; the second has his head thrown back, looking up to the sky; the third is almost identical, but with a glass “raindrop” on his face. The glass seems not to weigh heavily, but to flow softly, almost caressing the figure’s face.
Bilyk described the three works as representing a “process” by which a person moves from being locked inside the cast, to opening up to the world. “The raindrop represents his dialogue with himself and others and the whole world; it’s the answer he receives,” he said.
The cast with the raindrop is one of the most popular exhibits
The idea that unites the sculptures on display sprang from these three figures, although Bilyk said he didn’t have a clear concept in his mind when creating the works that make up the display.
“The worst thing is if an artist starts with some conception and prepares everything toward this. It’s like having a force over you, the need to fulfill a plan,” he said.
This perhaps explains the variety of the work on display.
“Development” shows a face becoming increasingly clear in six glass shapes on a wall. In “Transformation,” a kneeling bronze figure is partially encased in gypsum, seemingly stuck and unable to move, or is it being hatched into a new, freer life?
The exhibition holds together well, continually probing the question of our relationship with our environment through different shapes, angles, materials.
“Rain 2” is a figure encased in polymer, isolated because it is surrounded, but at the same time visible from several sides from one angle through reflections.
“Something more opens up in a person if you create the surroundings for him. Surroundings can both cover and open a person. In this case, it does both,” Bilyk said.
But what about the sculptor himself? Which of the three figures that gave the exhibition its name is he closest to?
Tough question, he responds: “I try to ask myself questions. These questions translate into sculpture and the answers aren’t yet clear to me, but the thinking process is.”
Kyiv Post Business editor James Marson can be reached at [email protected]
