Synchrodogs

Since 2008, Ukrainian artists Tania Shcheglova and Roman Noven have been working together on the visual construction of a new reality, which they have materialized into an art duo called Synchrodogs. Each new image pushes back the boundaries of artistic mediums and disciplines. Their work, in constant tension, plays between reality and illusion, between the natural and the artificial, between the obvious and the unknown. Synchrodogs are definitely unclassifiable. At a time when images generated using artificial intelligence tools are invading the web, a quick glance at their production could be misleading. Yet the two artists didn't wait for the arrival of this technology to challenge reality. For the past fifteen years, they've been creating their own reality. It would be illusory to consider Synchrodogs’s creation solely in terms of photography. Their artistic process is multidisciplinary , while their works place them firmly in the continuity of the writing of our art history.

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Synchrodogs is first and foremost a performative work. The duo have developed a meditation technique that has been an integral part of their creative process for over a decade. Today, they capture a subtle moment between wakefulness and sleep, then write down what they have just witnessed in their somnolence, before recreating these visions through art. Their photographs are, in fact, stagings of nocturnal dreams and visions that come directly from their subconscious. Working with their subconscious as artists is a way for them to access the most original and pure source of creation. Performance also manifests itself in their constant search for wild places around the globe. By taking the body out of its comfort zone, the duo demonstrate the capacity of the human body to perpetually push back the limits of its natural habitat. Synchrodogs is also an ode to the body as an aesthetic motif. The body is stripped bare, without becoming sexualized. The humans bare skin does not appear sensual, but rather vulnerable. It defines the shape of the body and is buried under a variety of materials, both natural and artificial. Now mere subjects, men cease to be predators and melt into the elements, becoming one with the planet.

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Synchrodogs' practice could be seen as a continuation of Land Art, an artistic movement that emerged in the late 1960s in the United States, which considers the earth and landscape as both raw materials and surfaces for inscription. In fact, they deconstruct it, unravelling the know-how of the previous century to propose a contemporary version in line with the issues of our time. Their work documents the new forms the Earth is taking as a result of human intervention in environmental processes. In Inner Garden Project, the central figure is a human being capable of finding harmony in nature, through escape and deep self-examination. The work was created in the Carpathian mountains of the Ukraine, a place of power still undergoing incessant transformation due to man's intrusion into nature. Synchrodogs is a call to collective responsibility. Halfway between a dream and a call for human life to be more respectful of the planet that hosts it, Synchrodogs creates a new kind of art: "environmental surrealism.”

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Text written by Annelise Stern - copyright ART GIRLS