william major and dmitry pechurin

a visual dialogue

We invited two artists from see-zeen #1 to kick off our new feature A Visual Dialogue. William Major and Dmitry Pechurin focused on environmental issues in their own landscapes on opposite sides of the world and seemed perfectly aligned to work in a collaborative dialogue. Happy they accepted the challenge, we now present the results of that match.

PHOTO 1 - William Major & Photo 2 - Dmitry Pechurin

William: My first image was of the landscape of Eastern Kentucky where there was AC/DC graffiti in a small sand cave. His response was an open field with a figure cloaked, reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World." I thought about hidden things within the landscape.

Dmitry: I decided to hear some tracks of this band specially, to highlight for myself that the sonorous voice of the vocalist is the brightest part of the band.
In my picture there’s a girl in a metal rescue blanket against the background of the quiet steppe. We don’t know if she is okay, if she is alive, but she is bright, she crushes into this quietness causing the viewer to worry. I want to compare this plot with the brightness of the vocalist’s voice and as a whole with the lettering AC/DC on the black-white background of the coal mine. 

PHOTO 3 - William Major

William: I thought about hidden things within the landscape after this.

Photo 4 - Dmitry Pechurin

Dmitry: I enter into this cave.

PHOTO 5 - William Major
Dmitry: I couldn’t quite understand William’s picture, it seemed to me that the humorous inscription ‘hungry’ is a little inappropriate, as if it spoils the connection in the dialogue. That’s why I wanted to land my vis-à-vis. I showed him, that we can’t talk about hunger here.

Photo 6 - Dmitry Pechurin
William: This reminded me of a friend, Bobby Simpson, who collects donations for less fortunate families in the county.

PHOTO 7 - William Major

William: What’s interesting about Bobby is that he is blind and is looking right into the sun.

Dmitry: I like his photo, but I’d like to remove the smile from the person’s face. I wanted to contrast him with a homeless man twisted into a weird shape. At that moment I felt that we were playing in a major and a minor.

Photo 8- Dmitry Pechurin

Dmitry: My fourth picture contrasts the reality and mood I’m in with William’s reality and mood.

William: Dmitry's next portrait is also shrouded and hidden.

PHOTO 9 - William Major

William: This made me start thinking about the pain of how it feels to be invisible. 
Dmitry: The man in the photo made me feel sorry for him.

Photo 10 - Dmitry Pechurin

William: He responded with a bare chested individual with a cat - the first time he revealed a figure in the open.

PHOTO 11 - William Major
William: I counter by going back to a hidden masked figure - a bear mask which responds to both horror tropes, a predator, and an animal that is common where I live.
Dmitry: In the (William’s) sixth picture my interlocutor hid the hero behind the mask on the background of Lynch's red curtains.

Photo 12 - Dmitry Pechurin
William: Dmitry's last image again goes back to the cloaked figure that he started with.

Following the collaboration we asked Dmitry and William about the experience.

Dmitry: It’s difficult to characterise our works in general, to say what they are about. I think I wanted William to come into my area of Russian hopelessness & meaninglessness.

William: Looking at these images I think they reveal a few things. First, we are looking at the landscape of two very different places - central Appalachia in the US and Moscow in Russia. The way we were looking at the landscape was finding hidden oddities within it. Either in a constructed approach or through documentary.

Dmitry: The process of collaboration with a complete stranger to me seemed quite interesting. We represent quite different and somewhat polar cultures, this has added spice to our dialogue.

William: There was not a huge language barrier, because we talked with photographs. We could communicate feelings visually. It was also a great exercise in getting someone who is unfamiliar with my work or where I live to respond in a way that doesn't follow a particular paradigm that I am used to encountering…it was fascinating to see correlations I hadn't thought of within my own work.

Dmitry: Probably because of the contrast with William, I am more firmly established in the mood of my works.

William: As a visual artist, I get in a rut with being in my own thoughts. Having someone respond to an image made me think about what my next move would be. It kept me on my toes.