Oleanna Newkryta

What we see and hear first of all, when we enter Olena Newkryta’s installation folding unfolding refolding are sewing machines, sewing fabrics. On the three large format screens that surround us, waves of folds of a white fabric are flowing towards a buzzing needle, resistant at times, yet only to be drawn back where they belong – between the shuttle and the feed-dog – by a hand that appears briefly within the frame. What we do not instantly recognize: the hand is the artist’s hand and the fabric is the fabric of the screen, on which its own hem is emerging accompanied by clattering sound. Therefore, in sewing screens, as Olena Newkryta calls this three piece work, “the relationship between the image and its material image carrier is directly
linked: there is no video without a screen, and no screen without video,” as she says herself. Not only the material and the medium are interdependent here, but also the spatial and temporal dimensions of the work directly depend on its visually and acoustically conveyed content: “The duration of the video results from the duration of the sewing process (15´40´´). The size of the screens was determined by the size of the video (16:9) and the widths of the fabric. The videos […] show no action apart from the production process.”
Reduced to these parameters sewing screens can be described as a work that is conceptualized in a consistently reductionistic manner which in that sense functions relating to both form and content. In search for artistic parallels to this view the most obvious appear to be the intentions of the representatives of minimal art (so-called minimal art from 1965/66 onwards), which Frank Stella so aptly described with his much-quoted sentence: “What you see is what you see”. Stella stated: “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. […] All I want anyone to get out of my paintings is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any conclusion.”
The whole idea was here identical to a mere image concept, a sensation expressed via visual means without any representative or narrative connotations attached.
Although Olena Newkryta is interested in the image “itself “, she is – not only in sewing screens, but also in the works belonging to folding unfolding refolding, to grasp. carnal thoughts and After Image – just as interested in a message conveyed via and through the image, that has a definite reference to the world outside the image. In order to establish these references for the viewer – again “without any conclusion”, by omitting, for instance, any action within the film apart from documenting the creating of the work – the artist uses the potential of the image to evoke events or rather narratives, by adding elements that have potential representational associations. Only “potential” because the elements taken from reality are permanently transformed into an abstraction that obscures the usual viewpoint. And yet this done by using means intrinsic to the media: in sewing screens the camera zooms in on the sewing procedure, that consecutively autonomous images are created that dominate the actual process. to grasp. carnal thoughts the blanket not shown from a photographic and perspectival top view, but it is an seemingly cubist montage of image fragments. And After Image does not even hints at its pre-images when we look at the unfixed photogram pages of this book in bright day light for no longer than ten minutes. Although Olena Newkryta’s installation can be described as reductionistic and minimalistic we still move inside of it listening and seeing, yet the “to see” from Stella’s “What you see is what you see” is set in motion. It leads us via the gazing vision to finding out, recognition, “grasp” and finally to the duality of the visible and
invisible.