Andrew Polushkin | Reconstruction Of Memory | bromoil, unique print, limited edition 4+2AP, 40x50cm

Reconstruction of Memory. 2007-2009

bromoil, unique print, limited edition 4+2AP, 40x50cm

Reconstruction of Memory.

Those who have crossed the Lethe lose memory. Anxieties, feelings, ideas, dreams – everything dissipates, like smoke. Only the empty shells of individuals on old yellowed photographs remain. A dry snakeskin on the shore.

I am looking at the photographs from the collection of the Museum of the History of Photography. Ordinary portraits from family albums, taken for memory, for oneself or as a present for those akin. Unknown faces, unknown people, tense poses – nothing, that could touch personally, interest a person who is not related to the characters via kindred bonds…

But something continues to live and pulsate, preserved in them. One just needs to take a step aside, to change the point of view, to rotate one’s crystal of attention to another facet, and it becomes accessible. At the beginning timidly, stealthily, like a bindweed shoot, feeling about in yourself for the hooking-points… "To Valentina Petrovna from Anastasia and husband, in happy memory of days spent together". Then more and more confidently and strongly… "To my dear daughter, with the hope of meeting soon". And here the shroud is already slipping away, through the cracks of the asphalted photographic graveyard spring grass is pushing way. The personal armour becomes illusory, and the illusory is being covered with flesh. And through your heart and brain it spreads its own fine net of mycelia of others stories.

Andrey Polushkin

bromoil, unique print, limited edition 4+2AP, 40x50cm

More than one generation of photographers of the post-Soviet space has been constantly attracted over the last twenty years by the theme of the past, of human history. It’s only the emphases that change. Those, who enter the territory of memory today, dig deeper than their predecessors.

From the first attempts to compensate for pain and solve personal problems, find out family legacy, to repent and walk cleansed through fields of nostalgia, contemporary artists, amongst whom is Andrey Polushkin, proceed to the material of old photography as already impersonal experience, having stopped being connected by the umbilical cord of childhood memory to the reality in old photographs. Andrey’s task is to pass through the thick layer of banality and through the stereotype of everyday photography of the past to the crystals of feelings, which ruffled the memory of those who were photographed when they returned to the photos, which are now silent with strangers.
Manipulating in the computer with images of the past, Polushkin-the restorer is united with the surgeon, reviving matter, almost lifeless from oblivion.

The new works continue Polushkin’s line of addressing memory, albeit the memory of objects (in the still-lifes of the beginning of the 2000s) or of shadows-ghosts of old estates. The works from «The Reconstruction of Memory» are especially linked to the previous series «The Erosion of Memory». Having almost lost the photograph, the artist once again catches its last weak glow, already nameless, trying to hear in it the heartbeat of life, banal, and in this it is vulnerable and touches the feelings of the viewer. An important phase in the reconstruction of memory according to Polushkin is the contact printing of new images and the developing, their presentation to the viewer as bromoils, heavy, varnish-covered prints, as if wet, as if floating, like the bark of prehistoric trees, resisting the transformation of everything into coal blackness.

bromoil, unique print, limited edition 4+2AP, 40x50cm

Polushkin creates multilayered collages out of old images, so that the hero becomes one of the faces, enlarged by the will of the artist out of a whole chorus, or the milieu suddenly appears around the double portrait in lieu of the studio backdrop. But the task of the artist is not to reconstruct historical realities, to fill old photos with symbols of their time. In the manner of today’s nanotechnologies the artist scrupulously manipulates secondary images – albeit running dogs or stacks of books, doors and the shadows of people – in order to reconstruct the spiritual atmosphere, to create, out of creaks and rustlings, a wind which, from the past, catches up with the contemporary viewer.

Irina Tchmyreva

bromoil, unique print, limited edition 4+2AP, 40x50cm

«Reconstruction of Memory» series was presented at:

- one person exhibition, Museum of the History of Photography, Saint-Petersburg, Russia, February 2009

- one person exhibition, Month of Photography 2009, Bratislava, Slovakia, Galeria Univerzitnej kniznice.
Curators: Evgeny Berezner, Natalia Tarasova, Irina Tchmyreva. November, 2009

selected works from this series took part in

- REFLECTION project, curator Vitaliy Smirnov.
Museum complex «Chernogolovs' House», Riga,Latvia
Central Exhibit Hall MANEGE, St.Petersburg
Photographic Museum House of Metenkov, Ekaterinburg, Russia

- PETERSBURG STORIES. The second half of 20 beginning of 21 century. Curators: Arkadiy Ippolitov, Olga Korsunova. La Halle des Chartrons. Bordeaux, France

-CONTEMPORARY PICTORIALISM OF ST.PETERSBURG. State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSPHOTO, St.-Petersburg, Russia. Curator: Igor Lebedev

-THE FACE: EVOLUTION OF THE PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Novosibirsk State Museum, Novosibirsk, Russia Curator: Andrey Martynov

-CROSSROADS: CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHY.
Australian Centre for Photography. Curators: Irina Tchmyreva and Evgeny Berezner.

bromoil, unique print, limited edition 4+2AP, 40x50cm