Biografia
'Consciousness is presumed....to have arisen during biological evolution as an adaptation of living systems..... On the other hand....scientists and philosophers consider consciousness to be....‘woven into the fabric of the universe’....in this view, conscious precursors and Platonic forms preceded biology, existing all along in the fine scale structure of reality."
- Dr. Stewart Hameroff
Lev started experimenting with multiple exposures instinctively wanting to deconstruct the images he shot by stripping away accepted points of reference. Each seemingly separate moment frozen on film became an intersection of time and space where conscious and subconscious constructs simultaneously converged. As he fine-tuned his creative process, Lev discovered that by manipulating universal points of reference with color, form and context, his unique multi-layered artworks dilated the viewers' experience of space-time geometry, and created an intimate tension between the new consciousness in the work and the observer. Lev's work seems to beg the question: if time and space is no longer uniform and absolute, what is real - the form or the sentiment?
The works are constructed from numerous photographs that Lev shoots in different parts of the world and then digitally assembles into a single piece, with hundreds of overlapping layers. To build his pieces, Lev employs an in-depth PhotoShop process that includes photo-montage, photo-collage, photo-blending, mosaic and other related methods that he fine-tuned through trial and error. The way words are created by rearranging individual letters, then words become sentences, and sentences turn into paragraphs, and paragraphs into books, Lev uses photographs, like letters of the alphabet, to “compose” his works.
In order to preserve the continuity of each project's narrative, Lev works on all of the individual pieces at the same time. His process is very much like a director working on film, who maintains the integrity of the preceding and upcoming scenes in relationship to the one he is working on in the moment.
Lev is a filmmaker, writer, portrait photographer and actor, living in NYC. He has worked with Robert DeNiro and Woody Allen, played "Eton" on HBO's THE WIRE, and currently stars as "Arkady Ivanovich" on FX's "THE AMERICANS".
