Artist Interview Transcript: Sasha Opeiko

"So my name is Sasha Opeiko. We are at McIntosh Gallery and we are in the exhibition space for my show, A Movement of Darkness on Darkness. It comes from T.S. Eliot's poem East Coker, and he is referring to a kind of mental vacancy or the inability to speak. To me, it's kind of like I'm searching for that kind of mental vacancy and I'm hoping that my interaction with the objects maybe, the viewer can approach it in the same manner. It's also a kind of metaphorical darkness. The fact that objects always have this kind of withdrawn and disintegration that we just have no vision of. It's invisible. 

The concept of non-human melancholy for me, actually started over a decade ago.  I was having some mental health issues and I would reach that kind of space of mental vacancy, melancholy. And I would find myself kind of being on the same level as all the materials around me. And I would actually visibly see that. It just kind of manifests itself as a kind of surface luminosity, but also in my mind, I saw that there was darkness there as well, kind of seeping through.

There are a number of small projects along with this larger installation here. It's a combination of found objects and digital video experiments consisting of AI and glitch, 3D scanning... there are also some 3D prints here. So it's very much about trying to integrate the image as an object digitally. I guess, trying to integrate the digital with the material aspects of this is disintegration as well.

 I arrived in the gallery here with two boxes of garbage and my devices, then I just kind of started picking stuff out. And I don't really seek found objects that I think might look good 3D scanned. It's just kind of like, whatever I happened to find. And that goes same for the appropriated video that I work with. I kind of choose it, or select it, or collect it first, without even really having any idea of what I might do with it. 

I try to give the non-human more agency than my own thoughts in a way. It's not like I'm letting the object decide where it wants to be, but I just don't want to overdetermine it. So the the debris that I work with is primarily like fabricated things or things that have gone through some kind of human manipulation processes of 3D scanning and then turning that into video and then 3D scanning it and again, turning that into video or putting a lot of images through an AI model and then manipulating that. There's multiple ways to manipulate objects and the objects in the images that I'm working with.  And each time something is translated, it becomes a different object. There's a bit of loss there when that occurs. Whether it's information or meaning, it starts off as raw material, but it ends up as raw material here as well. So it's gone through all these stages of fabrication and then abandonment and decay. But here in the gallery, or once I've collected it, it's raw once again. 

I think that the objects I find are kind of devoid of their previous - not only use value - but capital value as well. They're basically useless. This whole exhibition is kind of made up of nothing. So when a glitch first emerges, for example, when I work with video, the initial instance when that glitch happens is, failure. It's an error and it's like a pure moment of anti production. But once you turn it into a video that you can replay and play and replay, it's just a functional object again. Then it's just the residue of whatever was there that deteriorated. 

I wouldn't even say that I see myself as a creator. I'm more of a kind of operator or assembler of things. I'm very much drawn to the imperfections of digital technology. When you buy a new device, it's already kind of prefigured as something that will be garbage eventually. Or even when it's new and you want to resell it, it no longer has the same capital value. It's like the moment you buy something, it's already depreciated.

I think I want viewers to get a sense of the fact that images are objects as well. That they are part of the non-human as well. Just as much as anything else. "

- Interviewed by Dr. Philip Gurrey