Project

Cathedrals of the Future, led by Yevgenia Davidoff, 2023-ongoing

shown at Texas State FLEX Space , Austin, TX

Cathedrals of the Future is an elegy for time, a prayer for reconnection, and a meditation on the sacred within the everyday. Rooted in my experience of growing up under the state-mandated atheism of late Soviet Russia—a political atmosphere that erased the divine from public life—I have long sought the mystical and unexplained through art. In the ordinary, I look for what resists commodification: the soul, the sublime, the unseen.

The installation emerged as a counterpoint to both secular materialism and Western consumer culture’s cult of individualism. In a world that increasingly reduces the self to data and desire, to speak of the soul—elusive, unquantifiable—is an act of quiet resistance. For me, the studio is not merely a physical space, but the soul itself, where making becomes a form of saving.

Drawing on French philosopher Simone Weil’s idea that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Cathedrals of the Future was created with passionate patience. It is a space of radical stillness, of sensual wakefulness, of attunement to mortality and beauty. Constructed from upcycled domestic glass, hand cast cement, low-voltage light and dried plants — it evokes the architecture of spiritual longing while refusing nostalgia. Instead, it reaches forward toward a vision of human enlightenment through deep communion with the natural world.

Nature, for me, is not only a muse but a portal—an elemental force through which we may dissolve the boundaries of the self and briefly enter the All. The installation seeks to hold that ineffable moment of oneness: a space where time slows, the self quiets, and transcendence feels possible. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “To be beautiful and to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of Nature.” This work is my offering toward that ideal—a cathedral not of stone, but of light, attention, and presence.

Review in San Marcos Record