EVENTS

The exhibition "Dream-service" in Vyksa

Exhibitions
Dates: August 20 – September 19 (Mon. - Sun. from 10:00 to 20:00)
Address: Art residence "Vyksa", Vyksa, ul. 1 May, 36

Nika Chernyaeva, a participant of the Vyksa art residence (artist of the K35 gallery), a sociologist by first education, has worked in the field of mass communications for a long time. In her artistic practice, she continues to explore the information space around us, deconstructing it and collecting new meanings and images from the fragments obtained.

Going to Vyksa, the artist planned to conduct a visual study of the city and make a composite portrait of it, using fragments of those visual messages that would seem most interesting to her. "When I was preparing for the trip, I was surprised to find that the word Vyksa translates as "flow", "current". Once here, this "flow" completely carried me away. Vyksa is an incredibly eclectic city that surprises at every corner: works by contemporary artists, funeral parlors, beaches with mermaids, gift certificates for maggots, Eric Bulatov on the facade of a metallurgical plant, Hagi-Vagi and Kisi-Misi, Shortparis and Sergey Lazarev. I'm not talking about the unicorn, which is the symbol of Vyksa and adorns its coat of arms. The collage of this city is just off the scale, there are so many things around that you gradually begin to lose touch with reality."

The name "Dream-Service" was also planted by the "Vyksa current" — Nika noticed the sign of the store of the same name on the facade of the local shopping center "Babylon", which became one of the heroes of her canvases. "The theme of sleep seemed to me symbolic for the current moment. There have been a lot of events going on in the world lately, which would be much easier to think of as a dream. There are so many "services" distracting us from reality that in the flow of this cacophony you can not notice the main thing. And while we are looking in the wrong direction, the Angels of Peace are being quietly dismantled from our squares, as happened in Vyksa during my stay in the residence — this monument was the first thing I painted here, and when the canvas was finished, news came out about the deconstruction of the monument."

At the final exhibition, the audience will have the opportunity to look into the artist's studio and see sketches for paintings, references, notes, a sketchbook and even a personal diary that Nika kept during her stay in residence, as well as, in fact, painting. The angles of the city taken out of context were reassembled into new spaces. The collage effect has been pushed to the limit, the resulting images have become excessive, redundant, sometimes frightening. Niki's painting is loud and disturbing: fiercely bright colors, broken compositions, deliberately strange characters and situations. Why is this painting screaming? Probably, it requires us to wake up — yes, the temptation to be carried away by the information flow is very great, but the disappearance of the Angels of the World from our squares, alas, is not a dream, and you need to look at all this like a painting — with your eyes wide open and your heart wide open.