December 22 – 26, 2015
Video and Audio Installations
Borey Art Center
St. Petersburg, Liteyny Prospekt 58
Vernissage on December 22 at 18:00
As in previous years, Anna Frants presents video and audio installations. The artist’s works become partly fantasy and partly an instinctive immersion, intertwined with programming and robotics. This year’s exhibition continues the series of works “Personal Space” begun in 2015, dedicated to the phenomenon of attachment/love to the inanimate. In “Other Shores,” Nabokov called it an “individual secret”: “With unexplainable tranquility, I looked through the glass at a handful of distant diamond lights, shimmering in the blackness of distant hills, and then as if slipping into a velvet pocket. Subsequently, I distributed such treasures to the heroes of my books, to somehow get rid of this wealth.”
The Borey Gallery exhibition will feature four new installations: “Personal Space №2”, “Journey”, “The pesterer”, “New Year’s Project.”
Anna Frants is a multimedia artist living in New York. She was born in Saint Petersburg. In 1989, she graduated from the Mukhina Academy of Arts, receiving a classical education, and then expanded her circle of interests by mastering new areas such as computer imaging and animation.
Her achievements reflect the wide spectrum of the artist’s interests. Anna has received several awards for the best three-dimensional computer animation at prestigious computer graphics competitions (e.g., AutoDesk Planet Studio Award). She participates in and curates art exhibitions in the USA and Russia, teaches media disciplines and animation, and publishes articles on art. Her works are found in the Museum of Art and Design in New York and in private collections.
Borey Art Center was created in 1991 as a fundamentally new structure in the field of art and culture. BOREY is a civic initiative, brought to life by a group of like-minded people aiming to build a culture house, with doors open to artistic initiatives. The main task is to present a broad cross-section of artistic and intellectual life, necessary to develop criteria for evaluating contemporary art.
JOURNEY
CYLAND Media Lab
Old suitcases, audio.
The past is remembered in fragments, especially when you are not the one moving. I terribly love traveling, especially by train – you get to lie down! You can’t do anything about it, yet you’re speeding towards your destination.
Maybe there’s no need to rush there, but circumstances are such that you will have to think about life (lying down) anyway. And then you remember your childhood, and the feeling of sun-warmed moss when you lie down on it cheek first, it’s a bit rough but kind because it warmed up and smells like some sea, although there’s no sea for 50 km.
It smells like a hot coin that bounced from under the train off the rail, which we kids placed there. And the suitcase that’s “experienced” smells mysterious.
Mom told such a story, we had a cabinet, into which a bomb fragment got during the siege, and… made a hole in the cabinet. Fast forward 25 years and I, a three-year-old, stand in front of the cabinet. The BLACK, SCARY HOLE terrifies me. “Mom, it’s true that there are only things there?”
I don’t remember what Mom answered, but I’m so glad that THINGS remained with me!
From the series “Personal Space”
Space № 2
Anna Frants and Media Lab Cyland
Video programming, audio, cotton, household items.
Do you own the shadow cast by tree branches on a bench if you come to the park every day? The paradox is that it seems to be yours, you’ve gotten used to it, became attached, and loved it. You inadvertently become the source that casts the light. Unlike the emotionally “cold” sun, a person who has loved a shadow radiates warmth – warmth that is not rational, not practical, not subject to precise analysis and calculation.
In “Other Shores,” Nabokov called this an “individual secret”:
“With unexplainable tranquility, I looked through the glass at a handful of distant diamond lights, shimmering in the blackness of distant hills, and then as if slipping into a velvet pocket. Subsequently, I distributed such treasures to the heroes of my books, to somehow get rid of this wealth.”
“Personal Space” – a series of exhibitions dedicated to this phenomenon of attachment/love to the inanimate – of course, from a subjective point of view.
From the series “Personal Space”
“The pesterer”
Projector, video camera, Roomba robot, programming, video.
Anna Frants, Cyland Media Lab
Programming: Alexey Grachev
From the Free Dictionary by Farlex:
PEST /PESTERER/ n (colloq) a persistently annoying person.
