curator statement

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.