Placeholder
This project is an extension of my previous work in Out.View.Look.Point, which centers on my experiences of growing up in a block-housing neighborhood in post-communist Eastern Europe. The paintings in Placeholder are based on diorama-like sets that I built out of found tourist postcards reminiscent of the Sublime genre: panoramic views of grand vistas, giant rock formations, and gazing figures. In conjunction with this scenery, I place images of children playing in front of block housing sites, often unaware of their surroundings. Sublime tropes such as “the beautiful” and “the natural” in conjunction with utilitarian architecture, challenge us to rethink the value of block housing as a site of beauty or indulgence rather than a denigrated sociopolitical construct.
The paintings from Placeholder have an exaggerated theatricality due to the choreography of light within the dioramas. This whimsical quality is heightened by the apparent pictorial contradictions noted in the paintings: multiple viewpoints, nonsensical shadows, and paper-thin pictorial space. I see the dioramas as emblematic of the distance I feel towards my native landscape and yet the act of painting brings me closer to a place that is part memory, part imagination. Painting also provides another way for me to dwell inside places from which I feel estranged through a process of scrutiny. The images I create through this process read as both coherent and disjointed; they are made up of parts that belong together and yet imply multiple positions and histories.
