SHADOW - MAKERS

 

The story of this project began in 2019 when Kolchanov started taking photographs of shadows in his art studio. The shadows were cast by a major construction site on the Hudson Riverbank in New York City, half a mile away, which required strong industrial projector lights to be kept on all night for safety. Those lights highlighted everything between them and the building, placing shadows on the studio wall. Kolchanov started at 5:45 a.m. and captured about 2300 photographs of the shadows on the same wall over a period of 3.5 years. At the same time, he recorded sound from ten seconds to one minute. The images and the sound are not staged and appear as they were taken and then were assembled in a video editing stop-motion technique.

 

The subject of Shadow-Makers is, of course, shadows. However, unlike in a traditional photograph or painting, the subjects casting them are unknown. Seeing this project, one would try to imagine what those objects looked like. Is it a shadow of a whole object or only a part of it? Is there a story? Everything in this installation is artificial, except the tree below the studio window that sometimes shows up at the bottom of the screen: the construction lights, the cranes and bulldozers, poles and wires, the window of the building, the wall - everything is human-made. Except for the shadows. Shadows are immaterial. Wherever there is light, there is shadow, and the shadow belongs to the light, natural or artificial. The shadows in this project are presented as the only natural appearance. 

Shadow-Makers demonstrates the relationship between image and object where the object is not visible and where the image of the object - its shadow, is “calling” for the object in the viewer’s imagination. Each image in the presentation runs for one second, followed by the next. After a while, the viewer accepts images as objects and, with the accompanying sound, enters the atmosphere of the shadows that are telling a story. It is a story of the shadows.

 

In his shadow-hunting, Kolchanov shows the experience of time - itself an accumulation of moments - in terms of collecting and putting it together. The exhibition refers to a technique in photography and film by which a succession of images is taken at intervals to record change over a given period, resulting in a simultaneously accelerated and collapsed sense of time. Shadow-makers is a collection of precise, ephemeral moments and contemplations of their significance. 

 

Since the early 1990s, Kolchanov has had multiple exhibitions in the United States that explore generators of atmospheres: fields of sensory engagements, non-intentional traces, the luminescence of the support and markings of different materials, and the conditions within which we encounter them. The themes of his work are inspired by accident sensations, voyeurism, and cartography.

 

Andrei Kolchanov, b. 1962, is a painter and multimedia artist. He lives and works in New York City, USA