Week 6: Event 2

Eli Joteva’s solo show on memory, titled as "Mnemoawari", was astounding. She had presented the concepts of memory, dream, and confrontation of the past and future though her uniquely made artifacts. Three hanged iced balls would capture your eyes and a fixed enthralling sound would fill your ears as soon as you’d enter the gallery. A bright blue picture was projected on one of the walls and digital movies of the iced balls were playing on the other side of the room. You can catch a glimpse on some parts of the installations in the following video. 

She had illustrated the contrast between what is preserved and what's not by putting the iced balls next to a recorded digital video of each. While the movies were playing forever, the balls were gradually changing and melting away. As Eli explained, she had presented the cycles of change in our memory and also maybe in our lives through her art. The spheres would gradually turn into unknown shapes to the viewers as they were melting, just as the way our past and memories fade away in our minds. Before fading away for ever, each piece of memory in our brains changes so much as time goes by that it is sometimes way far from what had happened in reality. And during this time, we experience and feel differently as we remember things differently.  

Fig 1| Me and the bleeding ball

You could see yourself in all the objects and pictures. Looking at the iced balls, you could think it was you, the nature, or the earth that was encapsulated in those spheres. I was totally driven away by this creative piece of art when I heard her explanations. This iced ball was made of her favorite red flowers, and as the ice was melting, red water drops were collected beneath it.  

Fig 2| "Bleeding" Iced Ball

The ball resembled the earth and it looked like that the earth was bleeding hard to get rid of its past. Although it had a desire to preserve its present features, it could do nothing but to let go of the past, and to move forward with its future and fate. Also, the transient state of the ball would remind the observer of the transience of the present moment. This illustration also made me think of the nature. To me, the whole idea could be applied to the cycle of changes in nature as different seasons arrives.
Looking at the ball, I was thinking of how painfully nature gives away what it has at the end of each season; colorful leaves of dead trees fell on the pavements, and this is when fall says farewell and gives its place to winter. 















During the time I was there, I was also hearing a capturing sound that I later came to realize it was echoing Eli’s ideas in the room. The sound was electronically synchronized to the water drops of the following melting ball, but it was in fact connected to all the other installations too. As soon as I figured this out, I felt like I had entered to my brain and  each “ding” was the sound of a bit of my past memories echoed in my brain. 

Fig 3| Water drops from iced ball hit metal tray and create sound.

The concept of dreams and desires of future was also demonstrated in Eli's creative digital picture. The piece was called " Dream Augur", and it was a projection of her roommate's brain waves. To create the art piece, she had put a glass of water next to her roommate as she was dreaming and thinking and Eli had then frozen that water. She had also recorded her brain waves at the same time, and then decoded the color harmonics of her brain waves. The colors were then superimposed on the image of iced water. So the whole picture looked like a ball (or better called a person) which was radiating away its dreams. 

Fig 4| Dream Augur

Using technology, she was able to present her art uniquely and creatively. For me, it was very interesting to see how technology could help an artist in expressing what she had to say so eloquently. This experience truly opened my eyes to the potentials that merging of technology and art brings about. I definitely recommend going to her future art shows. You'll be surprised by how much you will learn.

Fig 5| Picture with Eli