naked state
This project, created during the Naked State residency in Canada, explores the intersections of nature, culture, and art through a feminist lens by focusing on the nude body as a site of both artistic expression and socio-cultural critique. Immersed in the naturist setting of Bare Oaks Family Naturist Park, Yelena and her fellow artists lived without clothing, allowing them to confront and challenge the social and historical conventions surrounding public nudity. Yelena’s work specifically investigates the boundaries of traditional, art-historical body language by adopting classical poses like Composite, Contrapposto, Adlocution, Pudica, Serpentine, and Odalisque—each pose laden with centuries-old ideals of femininity and grace. Her choice to use only her body, devoid of external materials, as the primary medium of her art speaks to feminist ideas of reclaiming agency and challenging objectification. By situating herself within these iconic poses, Yelena not only references the canon of art history but also disrupts it, questioning the traditional role of the female body as a passive object to be observed and instead positioning it as an active agent in the creative process. Her use of photography to document this bodily expression acts as a form of self-authorship, emphasizing the autonomy of the female subject. Through this project, Yelena opens a dialogue about the representation of women’s bodies, transforming gestures and poses historically associated with male-dominated art narratives into a powerful reclamation of self and identity. Her work invites viewers to reconsider how cultural expectations shape our understanding of nudity, autonomy, and expression.
