Waiting for the past. Gallery Show
In February 2020, my personal exhibition “Waiting for the Past” was held at the Art Gallery “Mystectvo”.
Cherkasy, Ukraine.
At this exhibition, I presented works from the series “Lost in Time”, which were created during 2019-2020. This series began about six months before the first KOVID-19 cases in China, and at that time we did not yet know what confusion awaited us.
“In the summer of 2019, I had just returned from NVAIR residence in the countryside and was still affected by places lost in time and space. I became acutely aware that even in the city, I was surrounded by abandoned buildings and places. Never before I was so close to realizing that I live in a space that we inherited by accident, and if you got something by accident, you don’t know how to deal with it.
At first, I broadcast only my feelings, but over time I began to notice that this state of uncertainty in the future covers the whole world. In 2019, the theme of the Venice Biennale sounded like “May you live in interesting times.”
This feeling of abandonment, uncertainty, and confusion formed the basis of the series. In artworks, there are almost no clear recognizable shapes, only spots of color, as if blurred objects in the fog. At the end of November 2019, the fog began to appear every day in the valley near the river near my house. And I spent almost every morning there. That’s when all the pieces of the puzzle came together. I realized that the fog in my paintings is the barrier that prevents me from seeing the future in clear forms. It is a feeling when you move and see only a meter in front of you, when you step in the dark water of the lake and feel the silt under your feet, when you step in the thick grass, hoping that you will not step on a snake.
In the spring of 2020, quarantine was introduced in Ukraine. I continued to work in the studio on this series every day. The level of uncertainty and fear for the future has risen to unprecedented levels. But when you look fear in the face, it no longer seems so unknown and scares less. The fog of the unknown future is dissipated.”
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