“Consciousness Doesn't Have Borders” Exhibition

The artists' artistic practice and biographies are closely intertwined. Yulia Virko currently works in Moscow after several years of studying illustration and painting in the United States. Virko has chosen painting and drawing as the main media for her works, within which she experiments with technique. Anton Gelfand grew up in the United States in a family of artists - emigrants of Russian origin. The artist mainly lives and works in New York, but most of the works for the exhibition were made in the studio of his grandfather - theater artist Valery Leventhal - in Maryland. Gelfand works with a variety of different materials, including using family and found archives.

The exhibition title “Your Consciousness Knows No Boundaries” predetermines the fragmentary nature of the exposition and refers to the complex structure of human consciousness. The installation is built on the basis of alternating works by artists, where Yulia Virko immerses the viewer in a bright world of colorful dreams, and Anton Gelfand - in the space of memory and consciousness in which they are born. The industrial space turns into an unrecognizable circular labyrinth that lures “circle after circle” and consistently immerses into the complex artistic concept of Virko and Gelfand.

"Dreams within a dream" - this is how one can call the paintings of Yulia Virko, executed in an emphatically free, risky manner. Each work has its own plot and is executed according to the laws of dreams and the unconscious, where truth and fiction meet: flamingos walking under the supervision of the police in the light of a lantern or a huge iceberg in crimson water.

There is no need to try to tie the works together or follow the development of the plot from canvas to canvas. For the artist, dreams are just a visual fact, and the works are illustrations to them. They are self-sufficient and integral, despite Virko's comments that they are a mixture of elements, a mixture of childhood memories and things she sees when she leaves the studio.

The exhibition also featured new video works by Gelfand. Although they are based on family video archives, they go beyond the autobiographical.

Found archives are mixed with audio, behind-the-scenes conversations, and videos spied on social networks, bringing everything together into “video collages” and new puzzles.

It is in combination, layering, collage and searching for possible combinations that the common method for artists consists. It also serves as an explanation for the diversity of subjects and techniques. According to Yulia Virko, "there is actually no order in the way our brain works. We don't see the beginning. We don't see the end. And it's hard for us to remember when we wake up what happened in our sleep, no matter how hard we try.

But something definitely happened. So it would be pointless to try to put something in order, because this something does not really exist." Just as there is no limit to rethinking the accumulated memories and constructing a fantastic reality.

For young artists, the boundaries of consciousness are just opening up, for them everything is still ahead. "We place certain hopes on our future works, but they do not justify these hopes. This happens," says Anton Gelfand.

Hence the quite natural process of searching for reference points, one's own identity and, of course, artistic signature. And as in a good film, the artists offer the viewer an open ending and an endless field for interpretation.