honorable mention
Gleb Simonov united states
title
Melk
What I'm trying to do is a study of structure, be it linguistic or compositional, that results in an ultimately lyrical outcome. The methodology of it is very impersonal and restrained, never directly human, never exploiting existing cultural paradigms, so the composition is focused very primarily on form, and the sentimentality of it comes from, basically, honoring it for what it is. In equal measure, it is a way of pointing and a way of worship.
This project, "Melk" (Norwegian for milk), was made with the help of the Going Public grant from Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo. It was shot on a specific site on the arctic plateau during the last weeks of the polar night, when the sun is either directly below, or barely above the horizon, and the day may last as little as 15 minutes.
It's a kind of a landscape that people typically have no inner relationship with. One can connect to a pastoral or a mountainous landscape based on how the Romanticists or Realists or even the Classicists pictured it, but the tundra is not the type of a landscape that has been properly worked through in the entire body of Western art.
If I were to find one word that defines it, it would be uniformity. Single-tone, flat, even. As Wallace Stevens put it,
"Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
His literary work has been long-listed at the international Debut Prize (2010, 2012) and appeared in many Russian poetry magazines, such as Воздух, Literratura, Polutona and others. In addition to poetry, Gleb writes educational art criticism on contemporary photography and painting.
In photography, Gleb works primarily with non-urban landscapes. His work has been published in Best of Photography books produced by the Photographer's Forum magazine (2010, 2012) and the award catalog of the Exposure Prize (2010).
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entry description
I work in poetry and photography. My influences, in both cases, come from post-war modernism: Russian metarealism and the Language poetry on the textual side, and Düsseldorf School and New Topographics on the visual side.What I'm trying to do is a study of structure, be it linguistic or compositional, that results in an ultimately lyrical outcome. The methodology of it is very impersonal and restrained, never directly human, never exploiting existing cultural paradigms, so the composition is focused very primarily on form, and the sentimentality of it comes from, basically, honoring it for what it is. In equal measure, it is a way of pointing and a way of worship.
This project, "Melk" (Norwegian for milk), was made with the help of the Going Public grant from Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo. It was shot on a specific site on the arctic plateau during the last weeks of the polar night, when the sun is either directly below, or barely above the horizon, and the day may last as little as 15 minutes.
It's a kind of a landscape that people typically have no inner relationship with. One can connect to a pastoral or a mountainous landscape based on how the Romanticists or Realists or even the Classicists pictured it, but the tundra is not the type of a landscape that has been properly worked through in the entire body of Western art.
If I were to find one word that defines it, it would be uniformity. Single-tone, flat, even. As Wallace Stevens put it,
"Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
about the photographer
Gleb Simonov is a poet and photographer, born in Russia in 1986, and currently based in New York.His literary work has been long-listed at the international Debut Prize (2010, 2012) and appeared in many Russian poetry magazines, such as Воздух, Literratura, Polutona and others. In addition to poetry, Gleb writes educational art criticism on contemporary photography and painting.
In photography, Gleb works primarily with non-urban landscapes. His work has been published in Best of Photography books produced by the Photographer's Forum magazine (2010, 2012) and the award catalog of the Exposure Prize (2010).
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