Roxana Savin

Stillness 

I have always had a fascination with the transformation that the landscape, as we commonly know it, undergoes during winter. 

These observations on both the earthy and the celestial are the result of a deeper contemplation on the vastness of space, an understanding enhanced by a state of stillness and immersion into an unknown and mysterious world, that hints to an infinity beyond one's physical existence.

By removing the distractions that normally clutter the landscape, the trace of man-made elements and preference for abstraction and simplicity of form, I aim to capture the core of the landscape, to unite metaphysical dualities including earth and sky, light and dark, mind and body. 

My aesthetic choice in Stillness is aimed at conveying a sense of harmony of one’s existence on both the universal and microcosmic scale, and and to provide an experience that ultimately transcends the boundaries of the purely aesthetic.

Present Continuous

This work explores the possibility of a temporally extended present, a refuse to embrace liminality. 

While I don't necessarily understand photographs as static preservations of a moment, their ultimate power resides in their capacity to suppress the present and create memories of their own. The  desire to memorialize fleeting impressions is rooted in the acknowledgement of the transiency of childhood and physical world.
I wanted to suspend the present by capturing present moments in an archetypal space where the temporal distinction between past, present and future is blurred.
In this space, the awareness of passage of time stems from reflecting on our memories of what has happened. But as the act of recording the present on camera unfolds, comes the apprehension that the perceived present is already past.
 

Dark matter

Is there such thing as an empty space?

Looking at dark water makes me have indefinite feelings. I can no longer see water as Creation, and I can only imagine what is beyond the limitless darkness:the opening of an abyss.

 Minor White once stated that one  should not only capture things for what they are but for what else they are.

The darkness of water, is it the same darkness that lies within  each of us? 

Early Days

This project represents an excursion in the past, a dialogue with my personal history. Having had very few images from my childhood,  my photographic quest has grown from the gaps in the representation of this time. A longing for memorialization, materialized post factum, led to a creation of a personal archive that never existed. 

Revisiting the city where I grew up, I experience a journey back in time. The city seems unaltered, a labyrinth formed by the apartment buildings, where grass and trees grow wildly between the cracked concrete and on the unpaved ground around the buildings. That was the playground for me and children from the neighborhood, those small alleys in the shadow of mulberry and acacia trees. The summers came and went, friendships were made and broken.

The concrete city slowly revealed itself to me; it took many years of exploring it. It is also this place with its harshness and its softness that formed me and gave me a certain way of looking at things. From under the acacia trees of my childhood I’ve never dreamt I’d see the world beyond it. The story of my city is about the resilience of man and nature.