Another Canvas

What is the residual value of an image shared on the internet in today’s volatile visual culture? This fundamental question served as the starting point for our collaboration with contemporary artist and architect Sergei Sviatchenko, known for his pioneering work in collage—a partnership more than ten years in the making. After producing numerous images while working in-house for Atelier Munro over the past three years, we found ourselves questioning: What truly remains of this work once the images are no longer actively used? And what have people actually seen and will even be remembered? To explore this, we invited Sergei to use our publicly available earlier work as the foundation for a new series of art. For which photography and art expert Roderick van der Lee wrote the introductory essay.

We’ve known Sergei and his work for over a decade, beginning with our deep appreciation of his ongoing photo-based project Close Up and Private, which started in 2009. He describes his methodology as “CONSTRUCTION – DECONSTRUCTION – RECONSTRUCTION,” where existing constructions are radically altered using only two or, at most, three elements—an approach he calls “LESS.” As our in-house tenure was drawing to a close, it presented, for the first time, the perfect opportunity to collaborate—much like the ontology of the new work, which repurposes photographs we’ve created over the last few years as components for entirely new imagery. The end of one chapter served as the perfect occasion for something new, built upon the foundation of three years’ worth of work.

Sergei’s works take a selection of images and recontextualize them, exploring the meaning and significance of the image in our media-saturated world. In doing so, he creates raw new imagery that reveals meanings beyond their original intent. By repurposing photographs—originally created to tell insightful stories about the character of the person wearing the clothes, rather than the clothes themselves—he transforms these images, investigating how they can be altered, layered, and reinterpreted, especially as the human component fades from view. The new images offer a reality that is both harsher and more stimulating, a dissonance that challenges our expectations.

The new images take the genre of fashion photography as their starting point, but quickly lose their original applied context, opening up new visual realities. By removing the human element from the images and restructuring the visuals, Sergei reveals unexpected meanings and explores how images change and reveal layers when reused. The result is a series that examines both the fragility and strength of images in our hyper-digital society, while simultaneously challenging the viewer to reflect on the value of images in our rapidly changing world

In addition to the 26 original works, a limited edition A3 magazine featuring all the works was produced for the project. During the little launch event of the project, two weeks ago, several works were also be presented as A1 prints and printed on t-shirts. Adding a final layer to the “Another Canvas” concept, where the composed image collages were explicitly shown across various media to add to the project’s research hypothesis. Now the images are set loose on the internet again.

In the words of Roderick:

“So even in that sense, when images seem to disappear at hyperspeed in this digital age, they do get absorbed into the collective visual culture, that is the great source of new creation, the expanding creative universe. Sometimes only as a tiny drop of inspiration, and sometimes in a much more substantial form, when they become formative elements on another canvas.”

 

You can still get your hands on the original works and a few remaining magazines see here >

For more work by Sergei Sviatchenko see here >

For more projects by Roderick van der Lee see here >