Atlas of Extraordinary Situations (AES)

painting and drawing series, 2021 — 2023

A collection of mystical, broken locations and worlds, the places and characters in which are inconspicuous individually, but together form a picture of a world that is shifted and mutated.

Different media used in the creation of this series: oil painting on canvas and large watercolors, are themselves part of the deception of the eye, where one medium pretends to be another. Watercolors acquire a rare scale for this medium, while the oil paintings possess an unusual fluidity and transparency. The theme of fakes and changelings is also unraveled through animals frozen between the worlds of the living and the inanimate. Such an animistic vision, encountered, for example, in ancient Japanese and shamanic cultures, is common for ancient cults, from which evolved well-known fairy tales with their archetypal characters and locations.

The environment becomes an actor in two key ways: crazy huts and unknown technogenic structures are combined into one universe, each having its own prototype. A strange design similar to flying saucers, against which the events of the series unfold, is in fact a cascade of transformers of the Arkadiev—Marx pulse voltage generator (Istra, 1967), built to artificially create lightning inside coils. Like any project of a Soviet research institute, the coils act not only as an artifact of the legacy of the Cold War, but also as a source of the “Soviet incredible”.

The theme of mapping, collecting individual scenes into a kind of “Atlas” is reflected in some of the names as well. For example, “Virgo south of the celestial equator” is part of coordinates for the constellation Centaurus, while the designation “0°50' to 6° below the horizon” is part of the scientific definition of civil twilight. Contextless phrases and linguistic ready-mades of the scientific environment set the planetary scale of what is happening, transferring the youkai of suburban Moscow to somewhere in the starry sky.

In the “Atlas”, interrupted space-time threads turn into a tangle of recognizable yet never-existing storylines of human rumor, legends and conspiracy theories.