Control on Eggs

The Ab Ovo [From the beginning, literally, from the egg] exhibition of works by Yuliya Lazarevska and Mykola Mandrych now on display at the Tadzio Gallery is marked with a variety of art technologies. Indeed, the exposition consists of the works in painting, video art, photo compositions, and sculpture made in combined technique of chamotte [fire clay] and metal. Such a parade of devices Lazarevska explains by the authors’ willing to give equal rights to the form and content of their works. Two closely connected themes prevail in the images, an egg and man’s head. The message for the egghead intelligentsia is particularly dialectic: the heads are sculptural, and the fancily dissected eggs hang up in the two-dimensions reservations of the photos and paintings. Thesis and antithesis are present, synthesis is happening in the heads of spectators themselves.

There are metal spirals — Chronos’ convoluted springs, a Christ’s egg riding a donkey, a chocolate Kinder Surprise — symbol of consuming evil at the represented video art pieces — in a word, an entire Ovoscopia, e.g., control of eggs’ freshness, which was primarily chosen as a title for the exhibition. An ancient manuscript or a clock mechanism are found in the eggs — such is their fate, ancient as time itself, to constantly harbor something inside them. Other’s head, as well as other’s soul, cannot be X-rayed. This is why petrified heads huddle inside the iron constructions. As a result, the brains and the culture they beget are controlled on eggs, a fragile and perishable material. There already is an intermediate result. At any rate, culture as yet has not become too odoriferous.