DREMA

Going through the family archive, Polina rethinks the events of the first days and years of her life, merging them with the present moment. She interprets the passing of time using Henri Bergson's duration theory, according to which the past and the present parallel one another rather than contrast. In the art space the merging fragments of childhood and maturity do not obey to linear chronology, but take place in the symbolic time of sleep and memory.

Paintings made in the artist's signature technique of photographic realism are adjacent to blurred pictures from her family archive — photographs of the artist's special life periods. Her first birthday, first year of school, first love, first paintings and her first developed film. The exposition is build as a memory frame, where certain pieces of memory connect to form a narrative.
The theme of the pink swaddling blanket, represented in The swaddling blanket and All that is left of me, plays a special symbolic role in the project. Polina's childhood blanket found by accident in her house decades later becomes an artefact of the passed childhood as well as the starting point in her trial to restore the complicated elements of that fragile reality that was erased from her memory. In the context of the exhibition the image of the blanket acquires an additional meaning — it becomes a portal into the dream space, using which it is possible to come back to one's childhood and relive the significant moments.

The active use of Baker-Miller pink that is considered to be one of the most calming colors and the intentional repetition of the subjects flowing from one work to another make the viewer feel a sense of nostalgia, bordering on anxiety or loss. The exhibition creates a multi-layered canvas, connecting the fragility of memory, the spleen of lost time and the delusional return to the fleeting fragments of one's personal story. The reference to the dream space allows occasional displays of vulnerability and emotional openness, through which the artist shares her personal life with the viewer, almost covering them with a blanket and immersing them in her own childhood dream.

«Gathering» show-room is open by appointment.
Adress: Rozhdestvensky blvrd 10/7c2, 2 entrance, 9#5232, 4 floor