Olga Chernysheva
dal 8/9/2008 al 10/10/2008
Segnalato da
8/9/2008
Olga Chernysheva
Foxy Productions, New York
An exhibition of recent photography and video. In these works the artist fuses her visual language to her native city, dramatizing the experience of loss, isolation, and renewal.
Foxy Production presents New Work, an exhibition of recent photography and video by Moscow-based artist Olga Chernysheva. Chernysheva has developed a distinctive and poetic iconography: figures are framed and constrained by doors, desks and hallways; lights form dramatic patterns; objects are entombed in covers and people are cocooned by their clothing; points of view are skewed at unexpected angles; the verticals and horizontals of cityscapes, and the geometric shapes of seemingly incidental objects take on a powerful, symbolic resonance.
In New Work, Chernysheva fuses this visual language to her native city, dramatizing the experience of loss, isolation, and renewal. Moving between empathy and voyeurism, and belief and disillusionment, she appropriates Realism to question what can be known and what can be held as truth. Recalling the strategies of artist Catherine Opie, Chernysheva here forges a critical and yet affective space within a documentary practice that grapples with the relationship between person and place.
Chernysheva's gelatin-silver prints of the Alley of Cosmonauts, the famous avenue of statues dedicated to the heroes of Soviet space travel, wittily capture its deterioration and the seemingly wayward attempts to salvage it. With the commemorative busts tightly wrapped in material as if to protect them from the present, and blocks of stone lying every which way, Chernysheva’s camera passes a lyrical eye upon the Alley’s faded glories and fallen pride. The Monument "To the Conquerors of Space", a modernist needle piercing the sky, seems to vainly struggle against the anarchy below it.
Chernysheva's photographic series, Moscow Area, frames people and objects within tunnels, hallways, counters, facades, and rows of trees and light-poles. Moodily lit yet effusing a sense of impassivity and resignation, her photographs portray a city that seems to have given up it secrets: their noirish lighting, rather than creating mystery, suggests a world of surface and flatness that is paradoxically radiant and atmospheric.
Opens September 9 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Foxy Productions
617 West 27th Street - New York
Free admission