Artist Elena Lyakir sees nature as a source of essence, spirit, and myth. Inspired by both nature's beauty and fierce power, she creates photographs that translate the visceral process of seeing into works of art that capture the depth of interior worlds, memories, sentiments, and dreams. Her unique techniques result in abstract, painterly pieces that evoke a feeling of flux and transience, suggesting the fragility and ephemeral nature of the human experience.

Learn more about Elena Lyakir's experiences creating the Locus of Memories series of which Beauty Will Find You and Us and Them resides within:

"As an immigrant my sense of home is nebulous and obscure yet it is tender and nostalgic. I feel a sense of devotion to the Ukrainian landscape, where I grew up. Time after time I return to sensations that I have felt there, like a scent or a sound, thus creating a new kind of landscape filled with sentiments and experiences I had collected over time. Landscapes are perpetually altered in memory and become a relative vision perceived through our own filters and the way we remember ourselves in the past. sentiments often fuse with our surroundings and we are able to transform one another.

Locus Of Memory is a series of in-camera double exposed images. They are instinctually fused and overlapped in the same way that memories of places are entwined with sentiments transforming one another and always creating new impressions about the past. The internal landscapes we create from memory are often bittersweet with nostalgia, as are the images in this series."