Stanislava Pinchuk, Surface to Air

Karen Woodbury Gallery; 2 September – 3 October

Installation photograph by Zan Wilberley, gallery website

The fabric of our existence is a material emptiness. An emptiness more rich and complex than all the heavy metals, tectonic plates and suns of our universe. Even more than cerebral cortices.

Let us meditate on a cloud momentarily. Fluffy, billowing and ephemeral. A consequence of the expirations of living things just as much as they are the consequence of the trailing emissions of a ballistic missile. White and grey and shadow. A cloud is an entity brought into existence by an interplay of forces. An entity dissolving in the process of it evolving. Particles agitating and coalescing into collaborative formation. The space between the particles both the absence and the material truth. We see faces in the clouds and the clouds are created through our faces.

Where there are particles there are waves. Up and down, back and forth, in and out. For the most part all of us living things are processing the same finite body of atmosphere. It’s all being pumped through a filter. Trillions of tonnes of swirling gases going in and out of billions and billions of lungs. In and out of trillions of leaves. Descending to the earth and sea, and ascending again to the sky. Megatonnes of salted water are pooling around the planet as the oceans lean upward toward the moon. All internalised in the biological body as the ever-beating heart. A filter inside a filter.

There is a case to be made that art is a filter too. A way for us to digest the complex universe around us. It both stills the surging forces of our environment and illuminates their intensities. The artwork of Stanislava Pinchuk balances stillness and intensity in a way so captivating as to stimulate the body and meditate the mind. While simultaneously meditating the body and stimulating the mind. Pinchuk masterfully conjures particle and wave, intensities so beautiful and terrifying that we lose ourselves in rhythm and stir ourselves in points. This is art at its most thoughtful and most delicate. Its strength is in its subtlety of absence and its intensity of place. For these are the pinpoints of our existence. Our trailing aggressions and our explosive behaviours, all so carefully wrought in the finest array of particle precision.