Jelena Sinik
Animation Director, Artist & Illustrator
re/impressions
re/impressions (Sept 19 - Oct 6)
Jelena Sinik and Nicolette Axiak collaborated on their first joint multimedia art exhibition re/impressions at Chrissie Cotter Gallery in 2024.
Produced by Boyd Britton, the show combined Jelena and Nicolette's sculptural and animated pieces exploring the 2021 pandemic lockdowns and 2019-20 Black Summer Bushfires, both momentous events in the Australian social and natural landscape.
'All memories accumulated throughout our own unique landscapes of chaos and intent come to assume a distinct and tangible shape - us.
're/impressions' traverses the deeper aspects of the co-constitutive notions of crisis and hope and their opposing and inseparable roles in unconscious ideation, action and eventual healing.
Through echoes of intimate impressions of momentous Australian events of recent times, the artists explore how repressed memories of collective trauma permeate through us, hardening within personal identity and compelling us to act.'
Artworks
1896 hours
The 2019-20 Australian bushfires lasted 79 days.
1896 hours is an installation artwork that illuminates the devastating scale of the Black Summer bushfires, with each individual pink flannel flower representing each of the 1896 hours our country burned.
The complete works of Henry Lawson provide a unique substrate for the petals, which glimpse fragments of his prolific writings about the harsh and often brutal nature of life on Australian land. 1896 hours is as much about hope as it is about devastation, as the handmade flowers express a sense of renewal in their transformative deconstruction of Lawson's writings.
This emphasis on the written word contemplates the importance of language, storytelling and rememberance in the process of healing. The artists' painstaking and meticulous commitment to the handmade process for each flower impresses upon the slow and arduous nature of regeneration.
This artwork was a physical expansion of Jelena and Nicolette's award-winning stop-motion animated film 'Forever or for Now?' (2020).
101 Days of Lockdown
re/impressions displayed Jelena and Nicolette's 2D animated film '101 Days of Lockdown' (2022) as a physical installation.
Presenting a 'physical split screen', along with the 'negatives' of frames from the film, the artists created an intimate and nostalgic peek into an unusual time.
About the film:
'101 Days of Lockdown is an experimental exploration into the mundane and domestic moments of aloneness that made up the human experience of the 2021 Australian pandemic lockdowns. The split screen film follows the lives of two best friends, 40km apart and on opposite sides of Sydney.
The unique format of one second of animation per day, creates a social document of the moods and moments that constituted both the similarities and differences of life in the Western and Eastern Suburbs during this strange time.'
