KUNSTKAMERA

Kunstkamera is a cabinet of curiosities museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Cabinets of curiosities (popular in Renaissance Europe) were collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined. They were used as a way to preserve natural and human curiosities and rarities (naturalia).   The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm, a theater of the world, a memory theater.

The idea of a domestic, indoor, microscopic reproduction of the world is fascinating, as is the almost maniacal desire of mankind to collect, stuff away, categorize, classify, alphabetize, catalogue and display life and nature frozen in time, properly labeled and named. Natural made artificial.

The collectors of these objects act as the curators, deciding what is important and relevant in describing the world.   I often feel like such a collector/curator: observing and studying people and personalities around me, keeping mental notes and drawing sketches. Watching people’s body language and gestures, I collect them and stuff them away. In my paintings they are brought back to life, are cast into scenes playing out various scenarios, following their own internal logic and desires.

It is my observable universe, my microcosm, the people and surroundings of my past, present and imagination. They all live and inhabit my canvases. This curated display of particular cultural types is also perhaps a form of propaganda.   The artist becomes a puppeteer, in charge of presenting the outside reality in a particular perspective, only picking objects to serve ones own agenda and discarding the ones that confuse it.  The artist presents images and personalities from the outside world, whether they existed or not, and so becomes the curator of memories.

The Doubles
Curiously, many of my latest paintings, besides featuring a subject/protagonist, have come to also feature the subject’s double/doppelganger/copy. I am interested in the philosophical implications of my subjects’ possessing such a twin. Who is s/he? The possibilities are limitless. It can be one’s alter ego, another side of one’s personality, an imaginary friend, one’s soul, guardian angel, inner demon, a shadow, one’s projected self. Visually, I find doubles fascinating as well. Seeing the same person appear twice in the pictorial plane can suggest a passage of time, an alternate ending to an event, or a physical impossibility of being in two places at once.

1) Palindromes (Diptych)



The relationship between these two pieces can be reversed depending on how the paintings are hung on the wall. This indirectly touches upon the relativity of time in terms of the succeeding and preceding generations. A person’s physical traits appeared in generations before their birth, get transformed with age, and will very likely appear again in future generations. Here a human being parallels a tree in a forest, each one similar to the others, yet undoubtedly unique. Each human being embodies individuality yet represents the collective.

2) Leash (Diptych)



Cutting hair often serves as a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood for many young women.  This piece is about the idea of one’s roots, ties to one’s home/traditions/culture and the process of severing these ties. In this piece, conceptually, hair is a restrictive force, which binds one to the stuff one is trying to escape. Compositionally, hair acts as a connecting element.  This work is about control of one’s identity and the subjugation of the past.

3) Inheritance



It is not only physical objects that we inherit, but less obviously it is culture, sets of morals, expectations, and traditions. These forces, similar to the physical objects in which we live in and place around us, both contain and envelop us. We immerse ourselves within them.

4) Preparation Day



This piece is inspired by a specific memory. When I was about eight years old, living in the Soviet Union, I was invited (along with other members of my dance group) to participate in one of the annual parades commemorating the Revolution Day on November 7th. Our group had a very modest task of walking across the square in front of the Winter Palace and presenting bouquets of flowers to some party members on the pedestal. Surprisingly, this meager task caused quite a flurry of activity in preparation. All the children were required to wear identical clothes (which were lent to us) and matching black shoes. Now this may seem like a reasonable request here in the States or even nowadays in Russia, but back in the Soviet times, good shoes were hard to find and many of the kids simply did not have black autumn shoes. We were told to paint them, quite reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice paints rose bushes to please the Red Queen. Equally essential was the smile in which we were required to wear on our faces while presenting the flowers to the important party members.

5) Vanity



The three reflections of the young girl appear as various manifestations of her ego.   Each one is perhaps also influenced by outward appearances, yet they are not separate.   Through the hair, it is implied that she is able to move freely, seamlessly, and continuously between the facets of her personality.

6) 24 Studies of Female Physiognomy



This piece is homage to the series of prints designed by renowned Japanese printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro entitled “Ten Studies in Female Physiognomy” (Fujin sogaku juttai). In this series, Utamaro was interested in probing beneath the surface of a subject to discern and create personality for an imaginary woman who embodied a "type.” I became interested in this ridiculous idea which entailed first devising criteria of sorting women into specific ‘types’ based on their facial features (I wonder what such criteria might be) and secondly in the idea of how one might approach collecting the specimens for sorting. I also liked how this idea paralleled the idea of the Kunstkamera, an attempt to catalogue the uncatalogueble. Women have often been treated in this very same way within the historical context. In my collection of female physiognomies, all subjects, despite their internal (emotional, intellectual, psychological and physiological) differences are sorted into one group based on the fact that they are all first and foremost women of some kind as recorded by history. Here they are bug-like, pinned-up, collected, scrutinized.

7) Ribbons



As with much of my work, this painting borrows heavily from the visual language of Russian orthodox iconography. When a viewer looks at an icon for the first time, its unusual visual flatness, figural frontality, strange proportions, lack of linear perspective and abstracted color scheme may seem unusual. It is also these characteristics that I find so aesthetically attractive. It helps to learn basic grammar of an icon to be able to appreciate them fully. Icon painting has the ability to represent several moments in time in one pictorial plane, where a character may appear repeatedly in different areas of the painting to imply passage of time (referred to as ‘continuous style’). Similar to early Renaissance paintings, when depicting an event, which takes place in an interior space (house, church, palace or inside city walls), artists place all of the participants in the foreground, outside of the architectural structures.  Icon painting often employs the use of reversed or inverted perspective, as well as psychological perspective (typical for medieval paintings) where the most important figure in the composition is the largest in size and placed in the center. Whereas originally, such choice in using the perspective may have been unintentional (linear perspective was invented much later), it was preserved when solidifying the Orthodox iconographic formulae (which is still being used today). Another interesting aspect of icon painting is its absolute frontality of the figures; it brings the figures in direct relationship with the viewer and allows for the fullest facial and gestural expression. In general, iconic simplicity, clarity, rhythmic restraint, symbolic colors, and compositional symmetry and balance, invite us to look past the visual form and think of that which is ethereal, eternal, and holy. This painting is iconic form applied to emotional representation.

8) Smoke and Mirrors



This painting is about outward appearances. It is also about the duality of conformity and individualism, as we are constantly in flux with both. Russian city culture places a very high value to signs of material wealth and wellbeing and the creation of a successful appearance. I am interested in these façades that we create for each other. 

9) Clouds



Perhaps homage to Mark Chagall and his flying figures, in this work people are elevated from the grayness of their everyday activities. In their daydreams they travel to faraway places and memories, their heads in the clouds. I am interested in this ‘other’ life we all have, the life of the imagination, a parallel existence to escape banality. Often this life is overlooked; it disappears as soon as one stops conjuring it. This image is a materialization of the imaginary.

10) Home



Home is a place where a person or a family lives. It is also a place where one feels he or she belongs, where a person can find refuge and safety.
In creating this work, I loved peeling away the façade of an apartment building and peeking inside the dollhouse. These living quarters are not necessarily just physical structures of brick and mortar, but are also metaphysical spaces for their inhabitants. I am always strangely drawn to old museum displays where people and animals remain frozen forever in time, seemingly caught mid-act in a private moment, supposedly unaware of the observer. This painting is such a record, a miniature microcosm of private moments happening in buildings everywhere.

11) Handful



As we continue the day-to-day concerns of our lives, we are doing so with an unanswered question of our creation and of our feelings toward our creator. We try to forget about our own mortality and the fact that we are spinning in an endless universe.