Event in a Long Shot

A solo exhibition built from hundreds of clay columns. The tallest reach the height of a person and stand through the hall like a grove; smaller ones crowd the floor in their hundreds. On three screens, clay columns rise, are cut by a blade, divide, and keep rising.

The title comes from film school. An “event in a long shot” is a scene seen from far away while its sound is heard close up. Galstyan uses it for the way a distant event, a war or a revolution or a single decision, reaches the viewer as something immediate. In the third video he breathes against the screen, and the sound of his breath fills the room.

The project grew out of Clay Border, begun in Moscow in 2000, and out of his first video works with clay from 1999.

Before firing, clay is reversible. Firing turns it into a hard form that cannot go back: the idea and the energy the author puts into the work freeze, and the process closes into an artifact.