The construction of metaphors, replications and metaphors of life, organ projection and "grimaces of the cosmos", "hunters in the digital forest" and identification of sign-symbolic resources of the city of Kolomna, as well as tools for designing figurative clouds, dialog with Caravaggio and Munch - these are some of the contents of my exhibition "Protosigns". The exhibition has developed from two cycles of works. They can be conditionally divided into wooden and iron. But they are united by the unity of the artistic method, which I define as the state of the protosign.

"Protosign" is a concept with which I distinguish a special state of an artistic work, when its meaning has not yet been reduced into a sign. Protosign is a "mobile" and changeable state of semantic meanings, it is a process of their construction, selection of elements, creation of variants, it is "understatement", contradictory complexity and redundancy. Protosigns retain sensual traces of real impressions and of the author's thought process.
Protosigns cannot be designed - they are a means of design.
The meanings of protosigns are "almost understandable" and their metaphors are open and perceptible. The organizing property of protosigns is the internal scheme of phenomena, which is embodied in the structure of works. And most importantly, a protosign can turn into a sign, ready to be retransmitted through different means of expression.

Anthropogenesis and phenomenality of each life, craft tools and archaeological objects, technical artifacts of different epochs and developmental constructors make up the circle of ideas and "matter" from which I construct my protosigns - models of possible metaphors - objects, words, schemes, educational and socio-cultural projects.

In this sense, I use constructors to create models (not "prototypes"!) - not complete, but open, transparent, fragile, changeable, demonstrating their construction and "insides". The process of construction, of playing with sets of different elements, gradually took a key position in my artistic method, allowing me to identify a special class of intellectual tools used for generative activity, which I called semantic generators. Semantic generators were created in different historical epochs and have very different embodiments, but one function - to produce new meaning.

The exhibition presents objects assembled from very different materials. Wood and metal, plastic and felt, bread and wax, graphite and light are used to objectify proto-signs.
Metaphors of human life - structures that develop due to objects stuck in them, turning into construction material and creating the phenomenality of "models of life" - were constructed from wood and other "natural" materials, incorporating archaeological and historical artifacts. And for the protosigns of the "emotions of space" the constructive basis became parts of the meccano constructor and fasteners, which can be bought at any construction market in the world.