In Nature We Trust: The work of Synchrodogs

We are Synchrodogs – a duo of artists from Ukraine, Tania Shcheglova and Roman Noven, working together since 2008. First we started as conceptual photographers and used photography as a media that helped us recreate our visions, we were often creating installations in wild nature and shooting them, also working with nudity a lot as we consider it to be the purest form of human – that is how we all are born. Now we mostly work as multidisciplinary artists, simply because we have more ideas than photography can let us fulfill, and we would like to have no boundaries when creating something, so for the past years we were working with CGI animations, video and virtual production. 

Over the years we had a lot of solo shows in museums and galleries in London, Venice, Chicago, Dallas, Milano, Barcelona, Krakow, Antwerp and near 60 group shows in venues like Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Guy Hepner gallery in NY, or Nordart in Germany. Also we were winners and finalists of many art competitions like Feature Shot award, Vogue Talent competition and LensCulture award. Our clients are LV, Burberry, Lady Gaga, Warp records, Swarovski, Bimba-y-Lola.

We are a couple of adventurous but very responsible perfectionists, who love making art more than anything else, so our path is a lot of hard work combined with a lot of weird stories happening behind. For instance, once we went on a 4000 mile road trip across the USA working on a Supernatural project, where we had a lightning bolt hit the ground right in front of our car while it was half floating in water with ice somewhere in Colorado. But as a result the project was shown at Dallas Contemporary Center, so it was totally worth it.

We both grew up in Western Ukraine, it is a country with kind and open people, but at the same time it is raw and aboriginal to some extent. When we were kids it was kind of separated from modern art or any trends, it made us discover the world of art ourselves through experimenting a lot rather than some art education. We both graduated from technical universities – Tania from Oil and Gas university, Roman from process automation department, at some way it helped us a lot in our perception of life and art as well, we love technical aspect of constructing a shot, we often create installations simply to shoot them and then disassociate afterwards.

It didn’t happen at once, it took us a while to understand that we are going through such a long way to give life to some idea not just for fun, it was (and is) our passion, and our mission to some extent. We are really self devoted in art, and to be honest a lot of our works are accomplished in dangerous circumstances that end up well. Once we had to go through a long slot canyon full of snakes to get to a dream destination, the other day we were shooting in a lake full of alligators and swimming spiders (yes, they exist!). Once our enduro motorbike was falling down the tough hill as the angle of the mountain was simply too harsh and we had to jump out of it while still driving to stay safe.

The breaking point in our career started in 2011 when Dazed and Confused magazine wrote about us and (as it was an era of blogging) hundreds of blogs and magazines wrote about us afterwards. That was maybe the first moment when we felt that what we are doing is being seen and being liked by people. Since that time many of our works became viral through magazines, later through social media. But we never intended to make it viral, we are just involved in creating something unique that nobody did before.
Also over the years we developed our own night time meditation technique, trying to catch the space between wakefulness and sleep. Our projects often deal with the stage of non rapid eye movement sleep, during which some people may experience hypnagogic hallucinations caused by the natural process of falling asleep. Experimenting with those lucid dreaming techniques, we usually woke ourselves up in the middle of the night to make a note of what we had just seen, gathering our dreams to be staged afterwards. So our art changed dramatically when we started practicing it in 2011-2012.
We were even nominated for the Pinchuk Art Prize in 2013 and made a solo show based only on those visions that we shot in Iceland.

We love collaborating with other artists and studios, 3d specialists, as a big complex project demands a big team to be released on a high level. For the Point of No Return project we collaborated with 3d artists Volodymur Bosiy from Ukraine, Simon Kounovksy from Greece and Stefan Batros from Romania, we developed virtual locations and FX with them. Last year we scanned Tania in 3d together with Deep3d studio, enlisted media support by Vogue Ukraine magazine team, developed rig with Studioz 3d studio and made animations with Eugen Sinicyn and Volodymyr Paslavskyi. Rendered volumetric scenes on Xiruim Farm. So we are always open to collaborating with artists that feel our vision and style and with whom we have high synergy together. So if any professionals are reading our interview and want to collaborate just drop us a line.

We all have moments of doubt or anxiety, but we also have dreams that lead us, and those dreams are way much stronger than any doubts that can arise. The career of an artist is not only a matter of talent, it is also a matter of luck to some extent, and if at some period of time too many things fall apart we trust that there is still a bright future ahead, because we have faith in what we do. It all comes from our heart and it’s all we have at the end of the day.

Throughout our career we met people who had faith in us and who supported us via collaborations, and we are really grateful to them. When we just started shooting it was Jakob Feigl (the editor of Neon magazine) who was publishing our photography a lot, and Neon is one of the biggest magazines out there in Europe, then it was Andrea Gelardin (who used to be advertising agent of Lady Gaga) who believed in us and we made a lot of shootings together (including one for Lady Gaga and her “merch”), then there was a huge 6 year long collaboration with one of biggest Spanish brands Bimba Y Lola – we literally call them our Spanish family and love them to the moon and back, and recently we got a book published by Louis Vuitton with editor Patrick Remy and brands team, whose support we also appreciate a lot. For us those people mean a lot, as it is very important from time to time to meet that one person who has trust in you and your art.

Of course, the artistic journey should not be a lonely one, any artist blooms when it is part of a community, then his art is seen and his message is heard, otherwise it is not fulfilling its function to the fullest.

Art is created to be seen by people, and the ways to show and see art are now changing. We are living in new times already which can not be ignored. Remember using pagers 20 years ago? Well, where are they now.. There is no need to spend life in ignorance, we are eager to develop the best version of ourselves and it only comes if you are educating yourself, getting to know more about innovations and technology development. Also we are happy that the world is accepting NFT art more and more. For instance, late autumn some of our NFTs were exhibited in the PH Museum in Italy as we were the winners of their Grant Award in 2021 and on huge Shibuya TV screens in Tokyo together with Superchief gallery.

We continue to work on art projects combining the real world with CGI graphics installations. We now started working on our first short movie that will consist of 11 scenes, and looking for ways how to rise budget for it, as the ideas are global and we are just a duo of artists trying to make it possible as we believe the result will be beautiful. We plan to collaborate with a lot of talents from different spheres working on it. There would be many people from musicians and dancers to cgi artists involved, but let’s keep some mystery in the meantime. It’s our biggest ambitious project for this year after The Point of No Return and parts of it will exist in the form of NFTs we plan dropping on Superrare afterwards. We will soon also drop a series of works called Nature Twins on Superrare – a project about duality of human personality which deals with embracing different unique aspects of oneself and accepting them. At the same time it is about multiverse theory, due to which our decisions determine one of a billions optional ways we can take. We keep working on topics of interconnection of art and science, as well as human and nature, as there are so many things still to be discovered and we are eager to see what the future brings to all of us.