The still life photographs of Vadim Gushchin harken to Suprematisim, a Russian art movement that reduced visual expression to abstraction and flat geometric forms — at once elegant, simple and pure, yet remarkably eye-catching and memorable.

Gushchin's minimal compositions and warm lighting transform these books, table, chair and surrounding spaces into blocks of color that somehow infuse these humble objects with unspoken higher meaning and emotional resonance.

The Suprematist movement, although complex, can be summarized most simply through its founder's, Kazimir Malevich, words:

"Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth."

Malevich was writing nearly 100 years ago yet his emphasis on the importance of feeling in art rings with particular truth for the practice of photography today. Photography can be coldly objective — but the best photographs often transcend the "visual phenomena of the objective world" to evoke a wide range of subtle emotional responses that linger.

Alexander Strecker and Jim Casper