curator statement
by Emily Newman
CURATORIAL STATEMENT--emily, part I
St Petersburg and Los Angeles seem an unlikely geographical pairing, the inverse of each other, or perhaps distant doubles. Petersburg’s dark winter days and nightless summers sweep it’s inhabitants into a colossal mood swing with each new season, while the timeless perpetuation of even temperatures in Los Angeles can make a person crave gloomy respite. While St Petersburg’s center was built for horse-carriages, it’s outer districts were laid with motorways so wide they seem to have anticipated the car-crazy California individualism of the Post Soviet generation. The result is a smog so dense that, in both cities, it hangs in the air like an object.Both places also, so some extent, live amid the specter of a certain other city (Moscow, New York) where everything sometimes seems to be “happening”. The mounting of this exhibition is a chance to pair works made by artists steeped in the phenomenological realities of these two distant places, cities arguably founded around similar ideals, to see whether modernism engendered a perspective which stayed true into the 21st century on polar opposites of the globe.
St Petersburg and Los Angeles seem an unlikely geographical pairing, the inverse of each other, or perhaps distant doubles. Petersburg’s dark winter days and nightless summers sweep it’s inhabitants into a colossal mood swing with each new season, while the timeless perpetuation of even temperatures in Los Angeles can make a person crave gloomy respite. While St Petersburg’s center was built for horse-carriages, it’s outer districts were laid with motorways so wide they seem to have anticipated the car-crazy California individualism of the Post Soviet generation. The result is a smog so dense that, in both cities, it hangs in the air like an object.Both places also, so some extent, live amid the specter of a certain other city (Moscow, New York) where everything sometimes seems to be “happening”. The mounting of this exhibition is a chance to pair works made by artists steeped in the phenomenological realities of these two distant places, cities arguably founded around similar ideals, to see whether modernism engendered a perspective which stayed true into the 21st century on polar opposites of the globe.
curator's statement
