Quick Clamps
Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
2024
Cut offs from ELAM workshops, quick clamp.
Quick Clamps is an ongoing series and a work in progress. The pieces published here were first presented at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2024 under the titles Avos’ Machina I and Avos’ Machina II as part of Eight Thousand Layers of Moments group exhibition. These pieces have now been renamed Quick Clamp I and Quick Clamp II.
These pieces were assembled in New Zealand by Yukari Kaihori and Oleg Polounine at the request of Ilya Orlov and according to his instructions, utilising found materials from the ELAM workshops and employing the suggested method of clamping. The selection and composition of materials were shaped by the colleagues’ own artistic intuition.
Cut offs from ELAM workshops, quick clamp.
"...this is Ilya Orlov's appeal to Dada games of chance that subvert bourgeois reason. His Avos' Machina I and II (2024) are made of bits of floor, picture frame, worktop and wall, held together by a clamp. Recalling Hans Arp's and Robert Morris's works, different moments, domains, places and surfaces of the built environment have been sandwiched by the clamp- universes intersecting in the present moment. The objects are a layering of chance encounters and prior lives in the style of Everything Everywhere All at Once."
- Gregory Minissale, Art News Aotearoa / New Zealand
"Ilya Orlov makes floor sculptures that are held vertically on the floor by large G-clamps which clasp together flat off-cuts donated by other artists. The clusters of wood, plastic, metal and board are surprisingly varied and delicate. Every ‘sandwich’ has a slight tilt, while the exposed stacked thin layers change in view as you move around. Brilliantly simple an idea, they are wonderfully complex to bodily experience."
- John Hurrell, EyeContact Magazine
Acknowledgements:
Matthew Cowan, Yukari Kaihori, Oleg Polounine, Henna-Riikka Halonen, Nina Dyer.
Photographs by
Lindsey de Roos and Henna-Riikka Halonen.