Stanislava Pinchuk, Bright Night Sky

Backwoods Gallery, Collingwood; 18 October – 3 November 2013

Stanislava Pinchuk, Detail from Constellation Map (Walking through Melbourne), (2013)

The intimacy of the universal is transferred via punctured repetition, through the delicate and refined work of a dawning star. An absence of material is elevated to form, the fractured becomes the connective, and everywhere the sensitive pathways of contemplative acts become the footsteps of an individual reality mirrored in the collective organic experience of the expanding universe.

Stanislava Pinchuk, aka MISO, is rapidly becoming a gravitational field of her own making through a series of beautifully executed ideas in her works. For ‘Bright Night Sky’, Stanislava has assembled a suite of her pin-prick drawings that map personal journeys as constellations and mathematically-inspired diagrams. Articulating the ambulatory urge as dotted lines pierced in paper is a wonderful device, amplified in the overlay of multiple pathways across a psycho-geographical landscape. Step, step, step across the space of the world. Lines demarcated in oscillating wavelengths of puncture, space, puncture, space. Particles invented in erasure, connectivity implied in relations.

Many moons ago an Estonian biologist (Jakob von Uexküll) described the immediate environment surrounding an organism as its umwelt. For a flea, that might be the grass it moves through and the heat of the mammals that pass it by and activate its biological urge to attach and to feed. For any organism, its umwelt its it universe – its full spectrum of spatial reality. For the human, we’ve expanded our spatial reality beyond the earth and it’s expanding with every astrophysical technology that we advance in our labs and our space-stations. Stanislava takes that notion, intuitively, and interlaces the expansive universal umwelt with the intimately personal. A walk between her home and her friend’s place becomes a trajectory of inter-planetary orbits and speaks volumes about our own navigation of the complex environment we inhabit.

Stanislava Pinchuk, Detail from Walking to All My Friends’ Houses in the World I, (2013)

The intermarriage of a beautiful idea and its beautiful execution is rarely so exquisitely consummated. The process of creation is clearly an act of meditative focus and ideas around the wandering mind and the wandering maps also come into the mix. The work demands close inspection by the viewer and the irony of watching an enthusiastic crowd at the opening pressing their noses up against the glass of each framed piece to study the minute detail of an image referencing the surface of a lunar satellite some 384,400km away is part of the joy contained in this suite of works.

The pin pricked absences punctured into the paper make the objects negative spaces on a field of material. This also throws up ideas around the nature of space between things. Dark matter and dark energy fill the apparently empty voids of the universe while the objects we think of as solid and dense are, in fact, almost completely empty of actual matter. Is it then the relations between things that are the true substances of the world. In which case, are these walked pathways, connecting the artist to her friends and her family throughout the world, the real reality of her universe? There’s so much to extract from such preciously produced work here. Walk on the fallen stars of hole-punched paper in the gallery space and let your mind traverse the wonders of the universe on the head of a pin.