Lev Rukhin

Oh!

lever — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 15:29:53 +0000

This epiphanic piece was shot on 6 rolls of 35mm film, and composed using sidewalks and telephone poles, subtracting all else with the use of white foam-core.

My trusted assistant, C-Dog, keeping an eye out while wielding two pieces of foam core.

Lipstick

lever — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:47:25 +0000

Two rolls of 35mm film shot crawling through the gutters, admiring the city with a red curb in the foreground.

Desire

lever — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:23:30 +0000

This piece is a lament. In 2004 I got engaged to an Italian woman, Desire (pronounced like the verb/noun). I surrendered my place in South Central Los Angeles to move to Rome and live with her and her two boys in a 600 year-old apartment overlooking the Pantheon.
Desire was of a prominent family, living in a world filled with social rules defined by Rome’s thousands of years of tradition and custom. I come from Russia, raised in America. The thrill of spontaneous sex, unworried freeness, and passion of our affair soon gave way and illuminated the cultural differences between us. Our engagement slowly collapsed. I found myself in a foreign country feeling bereft and futile. And heartbroken. You know this strange condition? You wake up at night, open your eyes on the darkness, and suddenly you feel you’re lost, and you start groping around as fast as you can, looking for something familiar and solid, the wall, the lamp, chair. I roamed the city streets of the Seven Hills.
I was reading Jacques Lacan at the time, a French psychoanalyst who died in 1981. His psychoanalytical theory was an expansion on Freud and the linguist Saussure, explaining that ‘desire’ necessarily lacks something, i.e. it is a ‘desire’ of lack. Lacan’s notion of ‘desire’ is, at its heart, a ‘desire’ for wholeness—a “hole in the self” that the subject attempts to close through an endless, metonymic chain of
supplements: the perfect car, the perfect boyfriend, a tenure track job, etc. But as soon as one’s supplement is acquired, desire moves onto something else. ‘Desire’ is a (representational) itch that can never truly be scratched.
I began shooting the facades of the city streets with a 35mm camera, twisting and angling the camera to re-urbanize Rome and depict the hole it bore inside me. I used the city as a large-scale glance of a sky—a hole—contoured by the walls of an ancient city, an obsession, a medieval puzzle, a daydream, a delusion, a search for belonging, nostalgia, a projection of hope for something otherworldly. I shot 6 rolls of film (36 exposures per roll). Between each photograph are 1-5 kilometers, and for each image I had to wait for the right time of day to get the necessary exposure. Each roll was employed with no editing, in true succession, so they were all memorized. No Photoshop. The piece took 3 months to complete, after which I moved back to Los Angeles.

Prophecy #2

lever — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:13:49 +0000

Virgin Mary

lever — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:12:49 +0000

Versions of Virgins. South Central Los Angeles has a heavy working-class Mexican population. Bodegas and markets are present throughout, the facades and sides of which are painted with murals of their patron saint, La Virgen de Guadalupe. Over her floats a nimbus of products: Clorax Bleach, candy bars, sugar, flour, and other goods that the store sells. The murals often get ‘tagged’ (graffitied) by gang members, and the ephemeral artwork is then deleted by a fresh coat of paint, and the process repeated. The Virgin’s image is ubiquitous, and fascinating in variation, as they are all painted by different hands (usually the store owner). As I drive through the neighborhood everyday, I record the Virgin’s location on my phone, then plot it out on a map. This first Version I did employing four contact sheets of 35mm film was to underexpose the surrounding product and properly exposing the compositions of the Virgin, thereby creating a Christian cross rising from the work in a subtle glow.

The Consortium

lever — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:08:53 +0000

The Consortium—I drove up and down all the major streets, boulevards, avenues, and promenades in Los Angeles photographing the sky scraping signs of our ubiquitous strip malls, announcing the businesses and shops and bodegas within. my compositions creating one, umbrella sign that advertises the consumption and consumer trends of contemporary society.

Return to Origin

lever — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:05:45 +0000

Several streets-worth of telephone pole just need to be re-arranged in one’s mind to return to origin…
Shooting 16 rolls of film, I zoomed in and out, flagged and raked telephone poles in front of my camera to lend the poles dignity and return them to their former glory, a magnanimous tree replete with climbing cogs and cable foliage.

Prophecy Study #1

lever — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:04:31 +0000

Prophecy Study #1—a sample from a developing series. This is a digital mock that was executed by driving (or being driven) along a sequence of freeways to repeatedly circle the city of Los Angeles. I shot the overhead freeway signs that offer their audience of what is available and when, sequentially shooting letters with a strong telephoto lens to compose a series of prophecies that dither between farce and condemnation.

Omnibus

lever — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:03:34 +0000

Les Quartiers

lever — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:58:05 +0000

Les Quartiers—Four quarters of a city linked by a choreographed connectivity.