Main Gallery

Asya Reznikov - Video Sculpture and Photography

January 12 - February 12, 2012

Asya Reznikov www.asyareznikov.com/

Along the Way

Reznikov’s work spans video, sculpture, photography, and drawing to explore the ambiguities of culture, place, and the gap between departure and arrival. Joining the exodus of Soviet Jews from Russia as the Iron Curtain began to crack, Reznikov and her family fled Leningrad in 1979, immigrating, via Italy, to a suburb north of Boston. Reznikov was just five years old at the time, but she took on the responsibility of helping bridge the differences between their old home and the new, becoming the first in her family to learn English. As countless immigration stories reveal, such circumstances often are experienced as burdensome, yet Reznikov’s loosely autobiographical work strikes a decidedly optimistic note, favoring themes of persistence and fortitude, often with a dose of humor.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1976 split-screen Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) may be a relevant predecessor, exploring as it does the gap between the familiar and unfamiliar, and how our fragmented identity cannot be untangled from the complex combination of what we see – both in real life and on the screen – and what we experience directly and hold onto in our memories. In Reznikov’s case, that fragmented identity is endlessly caught up in loops and duplicates, ascents and descents, clear trajectories and backtracking, seemingly straightforward chronological links that end up folding back on themselves, and Matroshka-like configurations in which one structure always contains its shrunken duplicate, ad infinitum. In the end, all possibilities seem believable.

Text by Casey Ruble, excerpt from “Between Here and There: The Art of Asya Reznikov,” 2011
Asya Reznikov works borrowed from Nancy Hoffman Gallery, NYC
www.nancyhoffmangallery.com/