Jury Comment by Donna Blama
This contemporary sculpture, Cherenkhova is part of a series that addresses and questions culture, gender, and meaning of femaleness through his/her story.
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Artist Statement:
Ever since I can recall, I have created art to put myself into a rich world densely populated by mysterious human constructs and characters. They are directly inspired by my experience in the real, modern world shaped by gender, appearance, health, sexuality, history and society. Thanks to a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board in 2007, I was able to create five of these characters in three dimensions, making them more real and physical then ever before. I chose to use female mannequins on which to realize them because it is a female shaped canvas and a modern, factory made venus. Each female character individually represents and physically grapples with her own issues that are physically manifested with such intensity that the results are symbolic archetypes of femaleness. The surface of their "skin", their clothing, their poses and their props all come to physically embody their respective identities.
Doris is a 50s era housewife who married the money thus she carries her married arm around like an accessory. Her modern, wealthy American life began to decay along with her marriage and her face until all that remained was her old party dress and her wrath, bubbling up like magma and cooling on the surface of her spine.
Elizabeth is queen, ruling over life and death as one of the greatest leaders of all time. She immortalized herself by choosing to marry her kingdom over a king and become the most powerful virgin bride on earth, rivaling the mother of God for a unique place in history.
The Broken Girl was born into wealth, yet mentally stricken early on. She wears her neuroses like fashion accessories. As she is held literally together by old medical braces, her emotionally paralyzed and waif-like state becomes a fad. She is handless like an unearthed, ancient venus, yet helpless as nothing is ever in her own hands.
As a woman in the meat market of pop-culture, Anatomarie's every angle is scrutinized and advertised; she is visually vivisected to the point where her evening dress is fashioned from what remains of her own flesh.
Visually inspired by an effect known only inside a nuclear reactor core, Cherenkhova is a creation of her toxic environment. She is literally a child of the nuclear age: betumored, melting, blind, twisted and ethereal. Her beauty and illness vie for power at the heart of modern life.
All five characters have a rapport with each other almost as if they are five versions of the same woman evolving right in front of your eyes. Or perhaps they are five facets of one personality, mine.
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