The power of skin

Vishwaveda Joshi, Contributor
Featured image courtesy of YFile
As an individual who enjoys art and is an advocate of self-healing, I was drawn into Gales Gallery and was glad to see Emanuel Ciobanica’s solo art series Exoskeleton, which ran from February 1 to February 20. Upon entering the gallery, I essayed to comprehend the mysterious grafts with unconventional symbolism.
Excalibur got a chance to speak with Ciobanica, a fifth-year visual art and art history student at York, working in a wide range of media to glean the meaning of the series full of mystery. Ciobanica says she has always been inspired by biology, psychoanalysis, and the properties she knows about skin. Combined with her recent personal introspection sessions, this led to the creation of this abstracted symbolic piece of art.
With a mixed media solo art exhibition, Ciobanica explores the transformative power of skin using sculpture material, special colours, and wax. “As far as the symbolism goes, wax is commonly used in nature to preserve [objects] and [acts] as a protective layer the same way as skin would,” she says.
Exoskeleton is a compendium of frankly visionary pieces of art. Each piece within the series, named very creatively, maps a different stage of an emotional journey related to physical and psychological healing. “Dissolution” for example, is talking about that feeling you get watching a strong relationship or connection dissolve and the paradoxical void, pain, and empowerment that comes with it.
Another example is “Burning Silence,” representing the moment when you know you just accidentally stepped on another person’s psychological land mines which follows with that intense silence (that you savour and dread) right before an argument sparks, explains Ciobanica.
The stylized skin grafts strive to convey a sense of personal tension and transformation, leaving the viewer perplexed and brings into focus the fundamental function of skin and its regenerative capacity and the toxicity created by humans in environmental and social realms of interaction. The series is informed by the artist’s traditional sculpture background in combination with modern concepts and graffiti techniques.
“As for Exoskeleton, the most essential part was creating an objective distance from the strong and diverse emotions connected to the theme in order to synthesize and create better symbols. I wanted to externalize a few complex ideas but there is always a great new way and an easy, illustrative, and superficial way of creating artwork. From the beginning, I was seeing it as a conceptual opportunity to develop a different language within my artistic practice.”
This exhibition was a means of representing human skin as a protective covering that has the power to heal physical and psychological wounds. “The reason I chose to exhibit these pieces is because I feel many people could relate to the concept and it’s a fairly untapped theme,” adds Ciobanica. The artwork was inspired by her personal quest for peace of mind and balance that invoked mystery and inquiry, rendering all who saw the exhibit to think about the power of skin.
And that is the power of art.