Vadim Tonkonog
Outside is a collage-based installation that combines video works, still photography, and digital collage to explore urbanity as both an aesthetic language and a psychological condition. Through processes of deconstruction, layering, and recomposition, the source materials are transformed into new spaces that exist between the real and the imagined, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior and presenting familiar yet distorted, ultimately inaccessible environments.
The German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life that the consciousness of the urban individual is subjected to an unrelenting flow of rapidly changing external stimuli. For Simmel, the city is not merely an objective “physical form and artificial structure,” but fundamentally a “state of mind.”
Working through fundamentally formalist means, such as form, texture, materiality, and color, I investigate the tensions between flatness and depth, between the real and the imagined, and reconsider urban space as a site of inquiry, looking to examine the urban experience in its collective, human, and deeply personal dimensions.
