CONTACT
Stick
2014-ongoing
HD video, 3:30min, looped
Mushrooms have always fascinated me, with their alien appearance and even more so the fact that the thing we see is just the “reproductive organ” of the mycelium that lives underground. The work plays with the idiom “poke it with a stick”, where you are unfamiliar with something, are afraid or cautious of it to some extent, but want to establish some sort of contact regardless. It’s a very primal contact establishment, one that you can easily imagine our distant ancestors may have conducted and one that you can observe in children as well. For me, it’s not about an act of aggression or vandalism, but a crude way of establishing an interspecies communication, however futile and absurd it is. It’s a metaphor for humanity’s general lack of knowledge about the natural world and the whole “picture” and the Dunning-Krueger effect stemming from this insufficient knowledge.
ARTIST
Dimitar Solakov (b. 1987) graduated from the New Bulgarian University in Sofia from the Department of Photography. The artist is using a wide range of media including photography, video, drawings, paintings, 3d printed objects, among others. In his work he is investigating various types of connections – between nature, urbanization and the human placed in the middle; between the past and its interpretations in the present. The works could be either very personal or completely detached from the position of the distanced observer. His works have been shown in numerous international shows some of which are: “Chronicles of the Future Superheroes”, Kunsthalle Bega (Timișoara, Romania), ”The Artist-Collector's Dream (a nice thing)" Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Italy), “Cosmopolis #2”, Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), “SUPERPOSITION: Art of Equilibrium and Engagement”, 21st Biennale of Sydney (Sydney, Australia), “What is Left”, (Veinna, Austria), “The Pleasures of Love” (Belgrade, Serbia), “The Power of Doubt” Times Museum (Guangzhou, China), Bienal de Cuenca XI (Cuenca, Ecuador), PHotoEspaña (Madrid, Spain), GRID Photographie Biennal (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, “Ritual Of The Habitual” (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), Sofia Contemporary (Sofia, Bulgaria), “All I Can Do Is Art” (Prague, Czech Republic). He has had one-person shows in: Structura gallery, (Sofia, Bulgaria), Vivacom ArtHall (Sofia, Bulgaria), Incubate (Tilburg, The Netherlands), Heerz Tooya gallery, (Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria), Credo Bonum Gallery (Sofia, Bulgaria), Sariev Contemporary (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), 0gms (Sofia), Vaska Emanuilova Gallery (Sofia, Bulgaria).