Entrance to the Exit 2020

Curator: What strikes you immediately about this digital artwork? Editor: There’s something dreamlike about it, almost saccharine. The pastel colors and amorphous shapes feel ethereal, but also a little unsettling, like a digital mirage. Curator: That unsettling quality resonates. We’re looking at Stepan Ryabchenko’s “Entrance to the Exit,” created in 2020, and immediately we are thrown into this virtual space. It is exemplary of post-internet art—a digital rendering devoid of any pretense to naturalism. Editor: Post-internet… that term still feels so slippery. But yes, there's a deliberate artificiality here. The perfect reflections, the unearthly colors...it screams of a reality built from code. What I wonder is what kind of critique the artist may be inferring. It clearly is very concerned with aesthetics, given its appeal. Curator: Perhaps, then, the entrance is both an arrival to this new landscape and an acknowledgement of the possibility of exiting the constructed narratives within these virtual spaces. The floating objects evoke otherworldly deities, or perhaps the relics of a lost civilization embedded in digital strata. The eye is immediately drawn into symbolism—what might these forms tell us about memory, loss, and technology? Editor: Right, because while aesthetically pleasing on a surface level, I can't help but see it as speaking to a growing cultural preoccupation with hyperreality and the blurring of physical and digital spaces. I am especially struck with the landscape reflections. They mirror—perhaps quite literally—a collective anxiety around technology, about the constructed nature of our realities, and our relentless desire to exit them. Are the two main sculptures a metaphor for escaping technology while paradoxically needing technology to "exit?" Curator: Possibly. There's a distinct lack of organic or identifiable forms. Ryabchenko is creating a liminal space in this landscape, one with entry and exit, challenging us to reassess our relationship with digital spaces. Perhaps he prompts the consideration: in constructing these realities, are we any closer to transcendence? Editor: A sobering thought. The artist does, no doubt, invite viewers to consider this brave new world and where we will be left standing once the door has been opened. Thanks for elaborating, that makes the artwork's message clearer, and its anxieties very palpable. Curator: Of course! And thank you for contextualizing the anxieties in modern digital art so precisely!