The Sensual Experience of the City
Changes in Contemplation is a series of projects about subjective impressions of different cities. These installations can be called urban casts or portraits of cities.
In the series, the artist addresses the theme of human interaction with the world around him and asks the viewer the question: Are you a stranger to the place in which you live?

The starting points in the Artkommunalka residency were the history of silk factories in Kolomna and the news about nighttime traffic lights. Every Kolomna resident and guest of the city knows about silk production.

By the end of the XVIII century in Kolomna there were three silk factories, and the skill of the Kolomna masters was known in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Kolomna masters created their unique decorations. Hand-woven silk handkerchiefs are now stored in the Hermitage, State Historical Museum, and the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Handkerchiefs with floral decorations of carnations, tulips, roses, and berry clusters were especially popular. Silk fabrics inspired by these ornaments are on display.

Olesya Ilenok also used traffic lights at the intersection of October Revolution Street and Kirov Avenue, Kirov Avenue and Lenin Street, October Revolution Street and Ivanovskaya Street, October Revolution Street and Malyshev Street as data about the city. Traffic lights at these key city intersections go into night mode, despite the heavy traffic at night in Kolomna. The number of intersections and the frequency of traffic light signals were the basis of the electrical thread embroidery of one of the works in the series.
The exhibition is also supplemented by hand-printed fabrics, for which various urban patterns are used: colorful layers on buildings, textures of manholes, bricks, plants, etc. The materials used are wild silk and silk jacquard. The drawings on the fabrics form a kind of "map" of impressions of the city, the artist's individual feelings of familiarity with it.

Text: Oxana Chvyakina, art historian, curator, and founder of the Chimera art agency and virtual exhibition platform