The Artificial Landscapes installation is a conceptual project of the artist Eli Ain, in which her primary goal is to stage a landscape from nature. Directly connected to her two previous projects “Double Coding” and “Foreign Landscapes”, it comprises a unit of exploration of the complex relations nature-art work, culture-nature and art-culture, which for some time now, represents her primary artistic preoccupation.
Ain creates a new, intimate natural ambience using modern artificial materials (several types of plastic) and assembles them together using materials taken directly from nature (branches, soil, moss) in a symbiosis of symbols which should evolve in a natural landscape.
In constructing the composition with the objects, the absence of the colourful dynamism is evident, and instead of it, we see a contrast play of black and white, and tendency towards even more reduced coloring. The play, so important in Ain’s artistic expression, we see in the formally composing the objects on site, in which often, the final visual result will depend of the space available to the author. In that way, her main preoccupation with the space, the spatial relations, and the objectness and her profound sense of creation is once again emphasized.
On the other hand, the fact that the author makes us see and think of nature inside an art gallery, the trees that are less and less present outside, the natural landscape that changes and disappears daily, is not coincidental and directly affects her artistic expression and the thematic decision, and speaks of a subtle engagement by the author who skilfully avoids her work to turn into an empty political statement, which is such a frequent case in the modern art nowadays.
text by Boris Krmov
catalogue design by Stevcho Naumoski
