Eve Kalugin

Sub
Single-channel digital video projection; Dimensions variable

Investigating themes of memory, domesticity, attention, and anxiety, my work integrates photography and language to document everyday tensions in marital life and cross-cultural encounters between Russia and the United States. I shoot, shift, write, record, capture, and caption the mundane. Working in the space between photography, literature and time-based video, much of my work combines visual imagery and text, reworking them into a new poetics. The imagery is often drawn from everyday, domestic scenes in which fears, anxieties or doubt cast a large shadow. Investigating the nature of dreams, mysterious narratives, and personal memories, I combine and layer multiple story fragments to create a poetics that subverts a linear understanding.

The literal sense of displacement is integral to my practice. A photograph claims to represent a version of reality, but precariously depends on linguistic modes for semantic meaning. By incorporating various forms of language to a single photograph, I am interested in altering the frame of reference for photography— questioning how we understand and process different types of information. What can a photograph say? How does language function in relation to the understanding of an image? How can language alter the meaning of a photograph? Together, can language and photography speak of something that would otherwise be indescribable by each medium working independently? Perhaps together, language and imagery can affect communication, narrative structure and the use of fantastical motifs to articulate the ineffable and the unknown.

In the juxtaposition of word and image, I create a space for false connections, misinterpretations, and new realities. Ultimately, my practice lies in the ontological and psychological space of narrative constructions. How can stories be broken; how can they be put back together. By combining visual imagery from one source with text that offers a different narrative, I juxtapose disparate moments in time to explore the ways in which their meanings contradict and complement each other, creating new narratives, new ways of understanding.