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Collected Item: “Places of Silence”

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Places of Silence

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Places of Silence
Artists’ Statement
The cataclysmic situation caused by the Covid-19 has created a new reality for people. Society faces disastrous effects of unprecedent pandemic: losses of the human lives, loneliness, luck of personal interaction, anxiety, feeling hopeless.
Visiting our favorite places, we were struck by the scarce silence of the streets, abandoned buildings, gardens. We saw the familiar places from entirely different perspective - they were silent. Spacious grounds, the ocean coast, paths in the sand were without the usual addition - a man. Our ongoing project “Places of Silence” reflects our personal experience in this new reality. Another aspect of the project is depicting the sublime beauty of landscapes surrounding us. We feel that looking at nature brings a balance and hope, as well as leads to the self-reflection, understanding oneself, and one's responsibility to other people.
The project consists of ten large scale mixed media paintings on canvases and more then eighty works on paper. We have chosen paper as the integral material for the series. The origin of paper is directly related to nature. Its texture and brittleness reflect the amazing vitality and fragility of the nature. We applied black acrylic paint on the traditional oriental rice paper creating the palette of different hues and then attached small pieces of paper to the canvas the same way as if we would be using paint. Dense layers, lumps of liquid mass soaked in water, monochrome colors, an endless gradation from black to white allow us to create rich Earth like surface for our landscape works.

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Paintings and drawings

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Asya Dodina

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Slava Polishchuk

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Long Island

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2020

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Library Staff Member/ Non-Teaching Adjunct
Conservator at Archives and Special Collection, Brooklyn College Library

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n/a

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