Moscow Plastic Arts, 2005

This project evokes both the Soviet celebration of labor imagery and the austerity of American Minimalist sculpture. Hovering between formalist inquiry and blunt physical documentation, Moscow Plastic Arts draws very particularly on the transitional material, ideological and social status of the rapidly commercializing post-soviet metropolis. The elegant dumbness of a still photograph can describe the melancholy transactions of a ‘modernizing’ culture with a vocabulary unique to the form. These pictures suggest and entwine two heroic models – Socialist Realism and High Sixties Modernism – that are both unavoidable and inevitably absent in the work. These frustrated evocations illuminate the tragic-comical space between idealist belief and material truth.

Archival pigment prints on manila tagboard, 24″ x 34″. Companion book published by Arcadia University Art Gallery.