The River of Current Reverse Time
A door standing in a void or in a half-destroyed wall, a door which is actually not even a door, but a doorway – as a symbol of transition from one space to another. We see a door standing in the desert, which we can bypass from any side and space will not change, but if we enter through this door, we will find ourselves somewhere in another dimension. In these works, the doorway leads nowhere, having already lost its functional meaning and leaving only a symbolic one, whose meaning is that time can flow not linearly, but somehow paradoxically, and we simultaneously find ourselves in our past because we remember it and project ourselves into the future. In this work, there are two portraits of me on the same plane, one as a child and one these days, and in both cases there are doorways – as if I am entering both here and there, I can now go through this door into my childhood and vice versa, when I was a child I was sort of projecting my future.
If you look more broadly, it’s a question of how “who we are” and “where we come from” affects “what we are now” and “why,” and it’s especially pertinent today.
The balls in profile
The series balls in profile is dedicated to 2020 in Moscow, the year when the city became empty, ruled by endless colored lines dividing people, friends, families into some completely incomprehensible atoms, the year (time) when all people put on masks and turned into a mass of little-known strangers, resembling each other like glass balls.
CROWN AMBIVALENCE
The phrase “For many are called, but few are chosen” has become a commonplace for a long time, did not lose its direct meaning until the last days, before the appearance of coronovirus in the world. The opposite for this Biblicalism meaning appeared in the spring of 2020: no one is called, but everybody is the elect – the crown, has existed a symbol of chosenness for centuries, turns into symbol of mass character.
I worked with the statistical data on Covid-19 for May 5, 2020 around the globe. That date was chosen to be one of the main elements of the image for a reason: 05/05/2020/0202.50.50 is a mirror image looks the same as in a direct one. For me, its duality seems to be a symbol of our common human presence. During 2020 we entered into the conditional zone of turbulence, we know when we entered in, but it is not clear when, and most importantly, how will we leave it, in what state, in what capacity? We, people of different nations, are biologically indistinguishable from each other, all the differences are in our heads, before we build real “Great Walls” on the borders of our countries, we invent their necessity. Covid-19 has shown that they are illusory – the world is one and I want to believe that shared grief, fear and anxiety will help people realize the value of unity
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“Coronavirus” in Russian is a sum of two words: crown + virus, Catherine Bubnova plays with the meaning of these two words and using the Biblicalism (For many are called, but few are chosen) to describe the contemporary world social condition.
#inthemindoftheartist
Calling me a photographer would be wrong. I use photos, but I transform them a lot. So photography for me is a tool, a working material. One particular frame is not the goal for me, because I use from 3-4 to 30 fragments of different photos in my work.
Towards painting
Gold and silk. Velvet and purple. The names of the colors and fabrics themselves give rise to the association with antiquity, the precious art of the great masters who worked on the order of the church and the doges.
Catherine Bubnova creates contemporary allusions to paintings: subtle, similar to those, which were painted after Rubens’ sketched for the streets of European capitals during celebrations of crown-bearers. Inside her compositions she puts the outlines of ancient monuments that every art student remembers from childhood. This is a language for dedicated, one code after another, when in silence, only by the movement of the eyes of the view- er and the smile of recognizing, friends and aliens are determined.
Who is contemporary art for? For all?—For everyone who stays in the culture. For those, who are ready to board the Ark. It is built and still waits in the port, with high-carved boards decorated with carpets, on which the Egyptian calligrapher and infanta of a cunning diplomat can be noticed, and the high masts with scarlet sails are still joyfully seen to those for whom the ship sails. ***
Contemporary photography and materials, with which the artist can work today being the derivatives of new technologies, civilizations
of the third millennium, bear in themselves — in the memory of a grateful viewer-creator — a connection with culture. And as long as the viewer and artist, and the viewer-artist are alive, the playing with veils, fine silks woven not by a timid silkworm, but with a smart machine, is still wrapped up in an aura of magical inspiration and involvement in that ancient language of images, which the culture speaks from infancy…
Irina Chmyreva, Ph.D.
The Live As It Is From The Very Beginning
This project The Live As It Is From The Very Beginning is a visualization of my unconsciousness, my wish to explore my world – the world of women. I use my art works as a tool to build up a reliable bridge between me and the woman’s land that could belong to me.
I am trying to look at my life from the distance to see it as a whole to have the better understanding and not to be distracted by the details.
I think about women’s live as a phenomenon that can make me accept the mystery of creation. By being a detached observer – the artist I position myself out of a frame of my routine life to comprehend the essence of Life.
The merits of flaws
I am a “photographer”, I shoot and keep everything, not throwing anything away, in case it comes in handy. For example, the The merits of flaws series uses film photos with technical defects – stains, scratches. When I scanned them, I realized that they were a treasure trove of ideas to help me make amazing work. Artists have a strange way of thinking compared to people in other professions.
Palimpsests of the twentieth century
Palimpsests of the twentieth century, strange, meaningless, erased and re-written, erased roughly carelessly, written over just as quickly, as if destroyed by the chaotic repetition like the moth-eaten tangled yarn of an inept spinner. The yarn at least had some function when it was new, now is gathering of worthlessness and shame for the ugly poverty of its existence. Snatches of phrases believing themselves to have been thoughts, deep footprints in history – an ephemeral set of footprints in the intertidal zone.
