A Visual Prelude to Intensities

• In Event: Gradients-in-Relation: Distance as Continuous Variations in Artography

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

The objectives of my paper include investigating the felt-body as a state in tension and operating with intention. The resulting ‘in-tensities’ enact randomness as a form of directional movement which pushes beyond a sense of control and regulation over inquiry. My experiments, in this case with snow, are defined by a creative impulse that is multilayered, doubling and re-doubling in digital collages. With collage, I explore artful motifs of traditional vernacular arts drawn from my Ukrainian culture to explore how gradients and gradations are a calling out for other signifiers / motifs / meanings to join in.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

Adapting motifs of “bigunets” (runner), with the smallest unity of “zernyatko” (a seed) – both distinctive elements of “Petrykivka” painting – I embed in the contours of my cultural stories of becoming to question differences that cause me to map surface tensions of landscapes in search of what motivates me as an artist, researcher and teacher. Connected and yet linear, the repetition of style suggests stability, continuity, consistency and at the same time, momentum.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:

With bigunets as a marker of scale, zernyatko becomes a marker signifying a change, with the inherent possibility to transform notions of distances. In practice, my personal subjectivities are much like the bigunets layered with the snow, and for me, this is intended to convey movement across places and events, actualizing childhood and adulthood. I am dis/connected with my family who still live in Ukraine, and because of my immigration to a new country, distancing has long been both a virtual and place-based reality.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:

I apply traditional design styles to photography and video, using digital imagery editing software. Each step is the embodiment of going an unknown distance, embracing the potential to experiment with software tools as culturally informed living inquiry (such as layer, zoom, crop, displace, change value and color scheme, brush, stamp, etcetera). For instance, layers as a function of software can be traced in the materiality of snow to demonstrate the entanglements of belonging that will dissolve in time and begin again in the landscape.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions:

My felt-body is formed in these markers, where my encounters linger in suspension, continually disrupting a sense of belonging. This is the purpose of bigunets as a gradient vector. It points to the liminal. It is for me, the marker of the highest intensity. The value of this gradient also resides in the affective, with qualities of sensorial, transformative and pedagogical intent coming to the fore, allowing for gradual yet dynamic relationships to form.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:

I attend to the radically enacted personal and pandemic distances as intensities, where now devoid public spaces hold relationships between the social and the individual. In the process, I continue to question notions of trust and care for the self and other, as well as in-tensities of going / keeping / knowing distance and distancing.

Author

• Mariya Kovalevska, Concordia University