HART+LËSHKINA stand firmly at the crossroads of art and fashion. The multi-disciplinary duo blend photography, sculpture, and performance to create beautifully haunting work. Like any of the greats, there is little distinction between their personal and commercial projects—any piece could be pulled straight from the lookbook and be equally at home on art gallery walls.
The New York-based duo recently shot OC’s winter men’s 2014 editorial and are currently working on This is only temporary, an ambitious piece exploring the impermanence of human actions in public spaces. The work, due to debut early 2015, combines video, sculpture, and photographs and will eventually find its way into book form. Before its release, we spoke to the incomparable HART+LËSHKINA about their influences, the ideas behind their new project, and the hardest parts of being in a working partnership.
View the editorial here
JAMES DEREK SAPIENZA: Your photography has elements of classic, almost Dutch-masters style portraiture, yet it is also so modern and minimalist. How would you describe the aesthetics of your work?
ERIK HART AND TATI LËSHKINA: Often our work is performative; we stage actions and create photographic documentation of them. We like to isolate our subjects in space; our work has been said to have a cold objectivity to it. We often explore various ideas of purity, tension, disengagement, and dislodged realities. From an aesthetic standpoint, there is often a sense of absence, poetic immediacy, and unstableness found within our images.
Even at its most whimsical, there seems to be an undercurrent of isolation or loneliness in your work. Is this an aesthetic choice or social commentary?
For us these are base undercurrents of existence; fortunately and unfortunately, we experience these states daily. This is not a conscious decision but, at its most elemental, the way we often view the contemporary human condition.
Do you have any influences, or has your style evolved organically?
We tend to share and appreciate many of the same things and also view our environment in a united way. Our work constantly changes and evolves; although, our concerns have always been the same. It has been a matter of refining our language since we began creating together. The process has been both organic and actively conscious. We are influenced by many things, primarily everyday life, human body, things we notice in the streets, human interaction, dance, performance, and sculpture. We also don’t draw borders between our personal and commissioned work—they feed and inspire each other, and we like to view them as of equal importance and meaning to us. Most of all we inspire each other in our daily life and our unified existence together as artists.
How did your new project This is only temporary come about?
It was really an evolution of ideas we’ve been exploring for a while: duality and symbiosis, looking at the human body as a sculptural form, documenting the unstable balance of human interaction and movement. Here you see the first part of the project, but there’s two more we are working on at the moment. Every installment of the project employs found garments that we modify to create propositions for alternative interaction. The end work will include multichannel videos, sculptures, printed matter, and still images.
Does working on this type of multi-disciplinary project present any unique challenges?
All our work is mult
The New York-based duo recently shot OC’s winter men’s 2014 editorial and are currently working on This is only temporary, an ambitious piece exploring the impermanence of human actions in public spaces. The work, due to debut early 2015, combines video, sculpture, and photographs and will eventually find its way into book form. Before its release, we spoke to the incomparable HART+LËSHKINA about their influences, the ideas behind their new project, and the hardest parts of being in a working partnership.
View the editorial here
JAMES DEREK SAPIENZA: Your photography has elements of classic, almost Dutch-masters style portraiture, yet it is also so modern and minimalist. How would you describe the aesthetics of your work?
ERIK HART AND TATI LËSHKINA: Often our work is performative; we stage actions and create photographic documentation of them. We like to isolate our subjects in space; our work has been said to have a cold objectivity to it. We often explore various ideas of purity, tension, disengagement, and dislodged realities. From an aesthetic standpoint, there is often a sense of absence, poetic immediacy, and unstableness found within our images.
Even at its most whimsical, there seems to be an undercurrent of isolation or loneliness in your work. Is this an aesthetic choice or social commentary?
For us these are base undercurrents of existence; fortunately and unfortunately, we experience these states daily. This is not a conscious decision but, at its most elemental, the way we often view the contemporary human condition.
Do you have any influences, or has your style evolved organically?
We tend to share and appreciate many of the same things and also view our environment in a united way. Our work constantly changes and evolves; although, our concerns have always been the same. It has been a matter of refining our language since we began creating together. The process has been both organic and actively conscious. We are influenced by many things, primarily everyday life, human body, things we notice in the streets, human interaction, dance, performance, and sculpture. We also don’t draw borders between our personal and commissioned work—they feed and inspire each other, and we like to view them as of equal importance and meaning to us. Most of all we inspire each other in our daily life and our unified existence together as artists.
How did your new project This is only temporary come about?
It was really an evolution of ideas we’ve been exploring for a while: duality and symbiosis, looking at the human body as a sculptural form, documenting the unstable balance of human interaction and movement. Here you see the first part of the project, but there’s two more we are working on at the moment. Every installment of the project employs found garments that we modify to create propositions for alternative interaction. The end work will include multichannel videos, sculptures, printed matter, and still images.
Does working on this type of multi-disciplinary project present any unique challenges?
All our work is mult