Zhenya Mironov. Constructing Metaphors

Barely thirty three years old, Zhenya Mironov is a widely acclaimed photographer. Leading Russian museums readily exhibit his works reinventing the photographic art. Constructing Metaphors, the series showcased at Erarta Museum, has been in the pipeline for more than a decade, presently comprising over a hundred pictures. In each of them, two ordinary scenes placed next to each other bring forth a metaphor – an image allowing for a radical rethinking of the conventional perception of reality.

Usually shooting in the environs of his home city of Tver, Mironov shuns computer editing, casting real-life objects as actors and elevating them to the status of characters. The unexpected juxtaposition of images induces a conflict. The objects paired by Mironov are similar in appearance, but completely unrelated to each other. ‘This is my dramatic and directorial device: the resulting conflict resolves in the viewer’s head, spawning a new story arc,’ explains the photographer.

The practice of Constructing Metaphors is reminiscent of the intellectual game described in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. Endless combinations of quotes and associations follow each other like beads on a thread and allude to multiple arts and sciences. The purpose of the game is to reveal the deep connections and common patterns in all that exists. The snail and the spiral staircase evoke the Fibonacci Sequence, the birds on a wire and plant burrs look like a repeat of a rhythmic pattern, a birch tree and a leaf resemble fractals, and so on indefinitely. These visual puzzles encourage us to use our brains and invite us to join in the creative process. This is exactly the task that the artist says he pursued: to give the viewers freedom to escape from the trap of their prior experience, to leave the matrix.