Regina Gallery is pleased to present the solo show of Natasha Struchkova, one of the very first artists to successfully bring to life the idea of transferring pixelated graphics onto canvas. Her new project, PROCRASTINATION, challenges the media zombification of our consciousness, along with its endless stream of trivia and news. In an attempt to mute such noise from mass-communication, Struchkova has gathered fragments of feeds from social networking sites and has created half-magical, semi-fictional images as symbols of our present time.
Struchkova’s paintings explore different series of topical current events, be they reports about snowdrifts paralysing the Moscow highways, the riot on Manege Square, the explosion at the nuclear power plant Fukushima-1 or the infant vaccination programs. She juxtaposes images of grotesque viruses and doctors attempting to fight them, while putting the child’s life at stake, with the faces of characters from news clips which have fascinated the public, and anime characters such as Khriusha and Zoich - the mascots of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. The author has successfully combined contemporary digital technologies with traditional painting techniques whilst embodying her own paradoxical fantasies. By melding together such unrelated chains of events, her artistic techniques have opened up the realm of art and graphics to members of every generation.
Artist’s statement:
There are questions the artist is always facing such as: is what I do necessary for anyone? For me? For others? For art? For everyone? What am I working on? Whilst thinking about all these questions, I figured out that I am sometimes in a state of procrastination. I read posts from social networks, watch cartoons with my children, follow the news, get upset about the election results along with everyone else on Facebook. But none of this is bringing me closer to my life’s work - my art. That’s why I decided to create a work of art which will turn everything upside down: make all the inconsequential events important and turn the state of not doing anything into art. In this work, I have tried to fit everything that occupied my mind, everything that came to me from the mass media, into a ‘factory’, processing the media images, which continued appearing to me the whole time I was working on the project. This factory takes the form of a Macintosh video game. The composition resembles an unfinished architectural section of an image. Its ‘torn’ structure stems from the fact that we can’t entirely absorb the news. We can only see a part of it. And yet we attempt to put the whole picture together without understanding the actual events behind them. We’re constantly being cheated.