Marina Shumakova
(Chelyabinsk)
ESSENTIA
Photography
November 19 - December 5, 2014

About the exhibition

The function of light is to encircle objects all along their borders, while rendering them into conspicuous images that can be understood in terms of visible features. That's the way it works in straight photographic practice.

The secret passion of light is playing over ašsurface and in the depths, creating a fantasy landscape of sparkling clear colors and spectral inhabitants. Abstract photography attempts the tasks to capture and record the effects of this free play.

At the start of her creative work as a photographer, Marina Shumakova is drawn to straight photography. She takes still life photos of coconuts and apples, ceramic vessels and copper jars, classic white calla lilies as one of all-time favorite flowers in the art of photography, chestnuts in thorny shell, tight tomatoes, luxurious baroque lobsters (with any ordinary crayfish from our rivers easily going for exotic species), attributes of art, etc. She takes photos of textured surfaces (in her 2013 series "Ochre" and "Earth Colors"), giving relief, animation and romantic appeal to plain material by transforming it into a landscape. She takes photograph of foliage, stones, sycamore wings, fir-needles, in a way that makes you think about her black-and-white "Calendae" (2013) as one the best cycles she has created.

Marina has long been a university teacher of Art History. Fine arts tempt her to search for the effects similar to what either Dutch 17th-century painters strived for, when they rendered a juicy core of fleshy exotic fruits or a high mirror like shine made from the well-polished brassware in the half dark room ("Pomegranates" (2014), "Metatexts" series (2014)), or 19th-century French impressionists aspired to, when setting themselves to modeling the surface of their ponds, rivers and inlets (2014 series "Impressionism" and "Water Signs").

Marina has a knack of finding her way to places of light playing in its own right, and that's where she is at her strongest. Such places where its unrestrained and unpredictable fancies take shape in spaces and figures so full of clear sparkling color and responding to a musical beat in such a way that, even though one cannot figurally describe them, they surpass the powers of eloquence on their own account. The attempt of verbal labeling of these images ("Passions," 2012; "The Silvery," 2013) is just a concern for the onlooker, while representing a delicate indication for an optional entry to the abstract space of light. Such are the series presented at the exhibition: "Figures," "Ice," "Stained Glass," "Light mediums."

The photos taken by Marina and the title "Essentia," which translated from Latin means "essence," match each other quite well, as the photographer pursues the very essence of objects revealed by free streaming light.

The title "Essentia" refers us suggestively to the aroma of fragrant transparent flower oil, to the beautiful blossom in the world, which is condensed to the extent of the tangibility of a single drop or snapshot.

Olga Konfederat

A b o v e : Marina Shumakova. From series "Water Signs". 2014