Where the Image Watches Back
Where the Image Watches Back
I started thinking about lighthouses again last night–maybe because I couldn’t sleep. Or perhaps because I’d spent the evening with three different pieces of art that had nothing in common except that they made me feel like I was seeing through water — shapes warping, something glowing at the bottom.
Lighthouses are strange things, aren’t they? They’re there so you don’t crash, but they only appear in intervals. Guidance delivered in fragments. You still have to steer blind between the flashes.
Which feels a lot like living right now.
We’re all slipping between beams. Attention divided. Truth pixelated. Emotions cut with code. It’s all very human, and very not. So I started looking at art again — I mean really looking — to try to find what’s still human underneath all the noise. Three artists found me, or maybe I found them, or maybe we all met somewhere in the middle.
Each one sent me reeling in a different direction — but they were circling the same idea. The self, not as a brand, or a political posture, or a hashtag — but as a flicker. A texture. A presence.
“Houses and Lighthouse” (2024) by Dmitrii Andrianov
Anastasiia Ermakova’s photographs don’t tell you who you are — they let you dissolve in the question. Her images are like liminal apparitions: too detailed to be dreams, too unstable to be real. She conjures multiple selves within a single frame, looping identities over each other like silk scarves on fire.
There’s one photo where the subject’s face — or maybe three versions of it — bleed sideways. Not in horror. Not in confusion. Just… becoming. It’s a kind of ontological molting. You look at her work and feel like you’re being watched by all the versions of yourself that didn’t get picked. That girl you left behind in 2018. That boy you were before you understood softness. The persona you tried on once in front of the mirror and didn’t recognize — but missed when it disappeared.
Ermakova’s aesthetic language slips between nostalgia and techno-futurism. There’s the look of early digital photography — red-tinted shadows, soft blur, uncanny symmetry — but also something timeless in the way she composes bodies–like religious icons rendered in Y2K grief.
Her women — if they are women — are staged not for the gaze but for the echo. They perform as if for an audience in the next dimension over. You sense pain, sure, but it’s stylized pain. Theatricalized alienation. Fetish objects turned philosophers, caught mid-rebellion, mid-transformation.
To me, her images evoke what it feels like to live inside a glitch — not the kind that crashes your screen, but the kind that makes you pause and say: this shouldn’t be happening, but it is.
And that’s the seduction. That Ermakova never gives you answers. She just offers the trance — and leaves you to figure out what version of you is being pulled forward through the fog.
"Shifting” (2022) by Anastasiia Ermakova
VIDEO CREDITS
Cast Ayala Abrams, Dante Norris
Directed, Produced and Edited by Artemiy Repin (2022)
I watched FRAMES by Artemiy Repin on mute first — a mistake. Without sound, Repin’s work loses its second nervous system. But even silent, it was hypnotic. Then I turned the volume on and suddenly the whole thing pulsed like a dream trying to remember itself.
Repin isn’t interested in linearity. Not in time, not in thought, not in narrative. He prefers rhythm — the kind that doesn’t just pace you, but moves through you. Watching his work is like hearing a familiar heartbeat in someone else’s body. There’s recognition, but there’s also unease. The pacing is off. You are pulled in before you realize you’ve consented to it.
His background in film, fashion, and urban motion makes total sense when you see how he constructs imagery. The models aren’t just bodies; they’re kinetic instruments. Tools for time distortion. The editing isn’t slick — it’s surgical. And yet there’s softness in the chaos.
One still from his portfolio lingers in me: a face, backlit, caught mid-blink, smeared in a mist of warm grayscale tones. It doesn’t say anything. But I felt it. It reminded me of the moment after crying when your face is no longer wet, just warm. That hollow pause before the next emotion.
Repin says the world has become too utilitarian — I agree. But where others protest with volume, he rebels with sincerity. There’s no smirk in his work. No postmodern wink. His videos open the viewer up like a psychic aperture. Not to entertain, but to recalibrate.
Sometimes I think Repin’s work is trying to whisper something you’re not ready to hear yet. And when you are, it’ll be too late to un-hear it.
“Breath of Life” (2023) by Artemiy Repin
Dmitrii Andrianov is the opposite of a digital maximalist. His images don’t explode. They glow. Houses and Lighthouse (2024) feels like a night that lasts forever — the kind of dream you wake up from and miss like a person.
It’s a rendered island. Geometrically sharp but emotionally soft. Boxy little homes clustered in quiet community. A lighthouse shining — not heroically, but patiently. Nothing dramatic happens. It’s a scene of being, not doing. And that, right now, feels radical.
Andrianov doesn’t posture. He thinks. And you feel that in his work. There’s intention behind every edge, every tone, every beam of light. He’s said his art explores “mental noise” — but what I love is that he also gives us mental silence. The kind that is hard to find, especially in a world that confuses stillness with apathy.
His past works (Mental Noise, OnlyFacts, The Value of Hands) suggest a deeper ideological rigor — a preoccupation with the ways we erase labor, distort truth, and drown in information. But Andrianov never moralizes. He aestheticizes thought. You don’t leave his work with slogans. You leave with questions — beautiful, glowing ones.
And maybe that’s what Houses and Lighthouse is: a question. Not a warning signal, but a soft inquiry into how we survive visibility. Into how we find home in fractured times.
There’s a certain wavelength that some works emit — not loud, not insistent, but persistent, like a hum you only notice once the room goes quiet. You don’t always know where it’s coming from, but once you tune in, you start to see how different frequencies can resonate in harmony, without ever needing to match.
They don’t point in the same direction, but they all ask something similar — not with words, but with texture, with light, with silence. You feel them when you’re not looking directly. Like something peripheral. Like the moment before waking, when everything still makes sense.
In a world of filters, they offer flickers.
In a world of spectacle, they offer intimacy.
In a world of noise, they offer the beat between beats.
That, to me, is the new psychedelia: not the trip, but the texture. Not the high, but the humming. Not the escape — but the invitation to stay.
Video still by Artemiy Repin
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