Replicate something that disagrees with nature to please our senses and the eyes of people who often want to see things they have never seen before and which sound crazy to them. Michelangelo Buonarroti on the fantastical in art.

12/10/2020—01/31/2021

Consciousness Doesn't Have Borders, the upcoming exhibition in Kazan, will bring together the artworks of Yulia Virko and Anthony Gelfand, two young artists. In their first solo exhibition in Kazan, large-scale paintings and drawings created by Virko will be presented alongside photo collages and video by Gelfand, in a multi-faceted installation. It transforms its overall look and content, changing from one exhibition to another.

The artworks and biographies of the artists are closely interrelated. After earning her degree in illustration and painting in the U.S., Yulia Virko is currently working in Moscow. Virko has chosen painting and drawing as the main media for her works, where she experiments with techniques and materials. Anthony Gelfand grew up in the US, in a family of artists descended from Russian migrants. Nowadays, the artist lives and works mainly in New York, but most of the pieces for the exhibition were created in Valery Leventhal's studio in Maryland: the studio of a prominent artist, set designer and Gelfand's grandfather. Gelfand loves to experiment with techniques and materials, including utilizing items from his family archive and found objects.

The title of this exhibition predetermines exposition's fragmentary nature and refers to the complexity of human consciousness. The installation is based upon alternating the artists' works: Yulia Virko taking the audience into a bright world of colorful dreams, and Anthony Gelfand exploring nostalgic memory and the consciousness into which people are born. The exhibition space becomes an unrecognizable circular labyrinth, which lures the spectator deeper and deeper, "circle by circle" and successively immerses the viewer into the complex artistic concept elaborated by Yulia Virko and Gelfand.

Dreams within a dream: that's what one can call the paintings by Yulia Virko. Her artworks have been created in a dramatically free and speculative manner. Each of her artworks has its own story and is created according to the laws of dreams and the unconscious, where truth and fiction meet, whether it is a flamingo walking in the light of a streetlamp, under police surveillance, or a huge iceberg in raspberry water. It makes no sense to try and tie the works together or trace a narrative from canvas to canvas. For the artist, dreams are just visual facts, and these works are illustrations of them. They are self-sufficient and integral, even though Virko comments that her works are a mixture of elements: a mixture of childhood memories and things she sees when she leaves the studio.

Paintings alternate with graphics, giving Virko the freedom for imagination and experimentation. In the process of creation, there is almost no self-control: first, the artist creates a background, dripping with colorful ink on a sheet of paper, then decides whether to follow the faded traces, writing the plot for the random form, or draw over it. Yulia Virko's work is based on her intuition and emotion, which can be felt upon the viewing. Color and its perception is also key as it completely consumes all her works. Her special relationship with color is also reflected in the titles of the works. It is not a random set of numbers, but a color code, where each number indicates a certain color.

The variety of Gelfand's works is so great that they may seem contradictory: a series of staged still life photographs, 'handmade" or digital collages of postcards and magazines, photographs for projects, bright everyday objects and texturally colorful paintings. The artist himself calls his experiments puzzles to be solved, rather than searching for beauty in them. Children's toys, jewelry and household collectibles composed with the help of polyurethane foam, take shape in unexpected ways to become photographs and objects of art. Balancing on the edge of past and present, the artist strives to breathe new life into old things that have outlived their usefulness. This practice, of reimagining someone else's archive, started when Gelfand began working in the New York studio of artist David Moon. "The former owner of the studio left many boxes with crashed cans. I just started to look through these cans, and all of a sudden, I realized that they are broken down by colors and years of production, so I decided to use them too. Perhaps this aspiration was mixed up in my personal interest in catching something, grasping it, trying to give value to some things around me,"— Gelfand reflects.

The idea to capture the moment of time becomes central in Anthony's work. For example, his small black and white works, which are at the junction of being a lithograph and a print, turn out to be imprinted fragments of his family's burned down house. Gelfand's video collages can be described as very autobiographical, but simultaneously with the family archive, the artist uses video and audio from social networks. The moment of time plays a significant role in the artist''s choice of naming the works as well. Having finished working on the canvas, Anthony Gelfand looks into the section of newspaper advertisements and names the work after the first person he saw in newspaper pages: John Blachowicz, Thelma Cornish or James Costantini.

It is in the assembling, layering, collaging and searching for possible combinations that a common method for the artists is found. It also explains the diversity of subjects and techniques used. The variety of such expressiveness and the almost complete absence of narrative are the distinctive features of the works of Yulia Virko. In her own words: "There is really no order in how our brain works. We can't see the beginning. We can''t see the end. And it's hard for us to remember when we wake up, what happened in our dreams, no matter how hard we try. But something was definitely happening. So, it would be pointless to try to get something in order, because this something doesn't really exist." In the same way, there is no limit to rethinking accumulated memories and constructing a fantastic reality.

For young artists, the boundaries of consciousness are only opening up. For them, there is still room for development: "We have certain expectations related to our future works, but sometimes they do not live up to those expectations. It happens," Gelfand says. Hence the logical process of searching for references, one's identity and, of course, one's style of art. And like in a good movie, the artists offer the viewer an ambiguous ending and an endless field for interpretation.