Revelation, Nazar Bilyk

Revelation documents the artist’s reflections on the environment surrounding every person. It is our environment that defines our choices and models our worldview, affecting our life no less than our DNA.

At the center of the composition is an empty space in the shape of a human figure, and it is this emptiness that gets equated with personhood. It wouldn’t have existed and wouldn’t have been visible to us if not for the rounded vertical mass of heavy metal that reveals its presence. This mass is the surrounding space, the corpus of preconditions and circumstances that define us.

The human figure in this sculpture is created based on what it isn’t: it is revealed by its environment. In the absence of real volume, the volume we deal with is imaginary, and it has to be filled with values, ideas or a worldview.