Evgenia Mikhaylova

Mimeglish or How to Spot a Meaning When The Sound Stands Still

Installation

2022

Pastel pencil, sand, minerals, interactive audio, clay, wood, PLA, bronze, digital video

00:10:00 [hh:mm:ss]

Gallery 1313, Toronto

Language is not an abstract, arbitrary system of signs but a reciprocal, continuous relationship with the land that surrounds us, the bodies that we feel with, and the human and more-than-human community that we engage with. The work proposes a methodology for meaning-making through broader linguistic definitions, acute attention and embodied empathetic experiences.

“How to spot a meaning? Once found, how to communicate with it? And how to share the knowledge acquired?Language is not an abstract, arbitrary system of signs but a reciprocal, continuous relationship with the land that surrounds us, the bodies that we feel with, and the human and more-than-human community that we engage with. As an immigrant, I have been on a continuous search for finding ways to communicate. Communicate with the changing community and environment, old and new. That constant search for ways of connecting has brought me to my current practice, which explores communication and language. The work proposes a methodology for meaning-making through broader linguistic definitions, acute attention and embodied empathetic experiences.How to spot a meaning? Once found, how to communicate with it? And how to share the knowledge acquired?The work investigates language as an interrelation between the visual, auditory and mental concepts through an embodied and attuned sensorial experience. The multimedia installation explores how the connections between the landscape as a space of limitless possibilities of engagement, sound, and embodied experience can assist meaning-making. The work suggests a methodology for meaning-making through broader linguistic propositions, attuned attention to the embodied experience of sonic and visual stimuli around us and a more expansive definition of a community, extended to the more-than-human participants in the meaning-seeking interrelationships.The work proposes that an empathetic reciprocal connection lies at the base of our understanding and earning for communication, which forms our language through attuned attention and embodied experience. This process affords the meaning-seeker the vocabulary to create, understand and share the meaning they encounter. A landscape or an art installation offers a space for engagement and bodily participation to create, stumble upon, and share the meaning-making potential.The work speaks to the language mutation though seemingly mute objects, whose linguistic stiffness and historically implicated materials partially influence how we communicate and think today. Partly, because the sensuous language prevails, it seeps through the rigid linguistic structures we create while gently directing us toward a more empathic connection. Lastly, the video projection questions the knowledge preservation methodologies in the absence of a physical object. The work hovers between the currents of intuitive embodied knowledge and analytical research in the propositional space of an art installation. By suggesting a path for engaged curiosity with the surrounding environment, it tries to assist the senses in forming a unique language for meaning-making and connection. The installation becomes not about objects in space but the methods of communication offered for a more attuned perception of the meanings residing there.”