Living in Kyiv, Ukraine, in wartime, Valerii Veduta has become accustomed to the daily sounds of air raid alerts and the sight of tanks and rocket launchers. The artist, however, has what he calls his “weapon of choice”: photography.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, he has been documenting his family’s life through a photo diary made with a large-format film camera and tripod. He processes the images in his Ukrainian earth bath as a pigment to give them a dreamlike, almost nostalgic look. Then it digitizes them.
Multimedia photographs from his family album War Times, which is now sold as NFT on virtual art marketplace Voice, do not directly document the invasion and its horrors. Veduta, 39, sees them more as a poem about the influence of war against other ordinary people at the intersection of the army clash and everyday life.
The photographs have a poetic quality, thanks to bichrome rubber, a nineteenth-century photographic printing procedure that can produce pictorial photographs from photographic negatives.
In one, titled Calm Not Calm Day, Veduta’s wife and 5-year-old son sit playing cards outside a window. At first glance, it is a quiet domestic scene. But take a closer look and notice the crisscrossing lines in the windows. It was a ribbon that the circle of relatives taped to the window to prevent the glass from flying into the room in case of surprise waves from an explosion.
Another image, titled Library and Military Vehicle, captures just that: a destroyed Russian army vehicle in front of a public library, juxtaposed with anything in a strangely serene pastiche.
Veduta’s paintings have made their impressions on Vogue Italia, Vogue Greece, Vogue Portugal and Harpers Bazaar and on PhotoVogue, Conde Nast’s fresh foreign photography database. The war disrupted her business and her son’s kindergarten. play.
“Everything is different, but now I force myself to do anything from ‘normal life’ to feel alive and normal,” the artist says of his photo series, which sells on Voice for $300 consistent with NFT (around £268). 480 Australian dollars).
The bichromate rubber stamping procedure consists of coating the paper with an emulsion based on powdered chemicals; a dry gummy substance called gum arabic; and a water-soluble pigment, in the case of Veduta, the soil of the soil of her war-torn country. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the gummy substance hardens and the traces of dichromate and gum arabic are removed. However, before it hardens, a photographer can brush or reshape the physical texture of the print to add a new expressive detail.
“I find it poetic that I have to use poison (that’s bichromate) and soil to create my images, and the poison has to be washed away,” Veduta says.
Veduta’s photographs are among those sold on Voice after a month-long virtual “NFT residency. “Through grants and workshops, the art platform for emerging artists has guided PhotoVogue artists from 29 countries in their navigation into the world of Web3, which can be explained in two ways, as my CNET colleague Daniel Van Boom explains.
“The quick and simple description is built into the blockchain or where cryptocurrencies and NFTs are incorporated into the platforms you use,” Van Boom writes. “The most confusing but vocal way to think about Web3 is a user-owned Internet. It is the dream of cryptocurrency promoters, who say that the integration of blockchain generation will lead to an egalitarian set. “
The NFT residency focused on the overarching theme of equity and justice, with art addressing topics such as the long-term effects of the COVID pandemic on children, the aftermath of a primary oil spill, and, in Veduta’s case, the demanding living situations. in a war zone. The new works of the residence will premiere in October and November.
The earth that stains Veduta’s paintings most commonly comes from the same place, but sometimes, as in the case of the bombed playground, dirt connects directly to the symbol it colors.
“My son grew up on this playground. It’s our place,” says the artist. “So, I took a picture of a crater and retrieved the land from there. “
Looking ahead, Veduta hopes the day will come when she can use another pigment to dye her photographs: Sivash clay, a saltwater lake in the Sea of Azov that separates Crimea from Ukraine. Veduta’s parents have a space on the shores of the lake. , whose black clay is famous for its healing properties.
“One day,” he said, “I will photograph and print images with this healing clay. “
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