On December 17, Sunday, in the flagship store Nike on the Kuznetsk bridge, artist Lena Sheidlina presented a series of prints for the New Year. The inspiration for these works was nature, urbanism and the winter collection of iconic Nike Sneakerboot models.
“This print is a story about masks,” Lena Sheidlina comments. - To use the motive of animal masks I was inspired by the New Year tradition of carnival, dressing up and the traditional oriental calendar, as in Japan. Every year it is a new animal and every year with its own characteristics. Animals represent different forces; different masks - different abilities for the one who puts them on, as if making up for the missing part of the personality: the ability to adapt to the environment from the snake, freedom from prejudice from the bird, strength, ambition and imagination from the dragon, sociability from the monkey. But the superpowers that we lack are just the outside. It turns out that each of us combines different masks, and depending on the situation and context, we act as an artist, a runner, another ... On the one hand, we hide behind the masks, and on the other, we are the masks, and through them diversity, we reveal ourselves wider, showing each time one of the faces.
If we talk about the visual part of the project, then I thought about the city and nature, about how to combine the two elements inspiring me in one work. City life and its speed, fashion and modern culture - on the one hand. This is the traced texture of the masks, which I did not come up with myself: these are textures and details, even the elements of the sole and laces, borrowed from the design of Sneakerboot sneakers and hidden in the images of animals. This is a tribute to a close, understandable to me fashion and modern urban culture. The second component is the memory of how I met the dawn in the snowy mountains. The color of snow and ice, the wind in the mountains, similar to the breath of an ice dragon ... This, of course, is impossible to forget. "
