Lika Brutyan was born in a family of scientists and artists in Yerevan, Armenia. Her training and work in psychotherapy has lead her to a deep curiosity in human nature. In 2004, she and her family moved to the US. While still in the field of psychology, she started to shoot. First, it was kind of self-therapy… Now it has become something that she hardly can imagine her life without. Over the years she became more and more interested in photographing human emotion and behavior.
The image of a woman, who is engrossed by the reflection of her own self…
These reflections look like fragile dreams, which aren’t thoughts though, and for which it is impossible to find words; these are only objects. The woman in these reflection-dreams loses her personality, takes it away like a mask, and gets embodied in her own body. The latter, stationed among other objects, turns them to images. It’s a coalescence of the woman’s image and the one of the object regiments dreams. Penetration into these margins, into this condition “in between”, is the most veracious state of mind. These are the impressions of the soul, embodied in a nude body and its details.
Withal, they are not fantastic. They are absolutely real specificities, construed though in an extraordinary ratio, with an exceptional approach predetermined by the history of each model. The past of each mold comes along in the body lines, in the appearance details, in clothes’ scraps. One is left only to materialize this relation to self, knowledge of self, the histories of the relations of each woman, the childhood memories, and dreams.
The artwork, ultimately, is a peculiar dream about a woman: A dream preserved by objects that the woman has surrounded herself with. This imagined fulfillment of dreams bespeaks to preserve a dream from reality. A return to a queer pre-natal continuum, loss of interest to the outer world are followed by a transformation of thoughts into visions, then their condensation, and shift… And we witness a substitution of this hidden content by symbols: Thoughts and reflections are replaced with illustrations and images.
Predicate nakedness gives a birth to a secret. It magnifies. It urges the universe of perception to unfold in order o reckon an image, to disclose a face. Yet the image is imperceptibly blurred in an attempt to get closer. So is the secret of femininity.
