Artist Spotlight: Eliot Lee Hazel x Aliona Kononova
This week’s StandardVision artist spotlight on the SVLA1 screen at the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles features work by photographer Eliot Lee Hazel and fashion designer Aliona Kononova.
Lee Hazel and Kononova are the latest of many artists to be invited to take over a two week-long recurring 15-second spot to showcase their work to the public.A fearless and truly unique artist, Eliot Lee Hazel's portraiture and stylized conceptual photography has achieved a worldwide cult following. Splitting his time between LA and London, Eliot approaches fashion, music and personal projects with a distinct and singular vision, often exploring themes of isolation and detachment.He has shot for likeminded brands such as Chapter and Persol, and has collaborated with a range of influential fellow artists including Thom Yorke, Beck, Bat For Lashes, Interpol and Ariel Pink.Eliot’s influential style, developed from extraordinary, innate visual taste has inspired and influenced a whole genre of today’s photographic aesthetics.
A gifted renaissance spirit of vastly varied talents, Eliot’s creative eye and transcendent perspective are the perfect culmination of his European roots’s spiritual marriage to a haunting Los Angeles. An unstoppable, affable enigma in constant re-invention, his consistent caliber has produced an oeuvre to marvel at. In this series, his collaboration is with distinctive couture designer and frequent provocateur partner in crime, Aliona Kononova.Los Angeles based, Moldovian born designer Aliona Kononova’s unwavering aesthetic combined with sweeping, bold architectural lines and geometric forms has deemed her a fashion favorite among the international art and cultural crowd.
After graduating from the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan, Italy, Kononova completed an internship with renowned fashion designer Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence and went on to head the creative office at Denis Simachev in Milan. In 2009 she launched her own brand in Milan, where she lived and worked for twelve years.Aliona participated in the 54th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2011, representing Moldova for the Transnistria Project.
In the same year, Kononova won the millinery talent competition led by Stephen Jones, Vogue UK and Talenthouse. Kononova’s winning Dandelion Hat, created using fibre rays, was published in Vogue, where she was recognized as “Millinery’s New Star” and the piece was exhibited alongside the greatest hats of the last century in Hats: An Anthology at New York's Bard Graduate Center Gallery.Recent projects include a performative collaboration with award winning choreographer and dancer Ryan Heffington and Russian art rock musician Ilya Lagutenko presented at the 69th Festival de Cannes to inaugurate James Franco's philanthropic film studios Elysium Bandini Studios.
You can catch Eliot Lee Hazel and Aliona Kononova’s work on the SVLA1 screen through May August 19.