NYAB Event - Asya Reznikov "Up-Routed"

Asya Reznikov "Up-Routed"

This event has ended.
At Nancy Hoffman Gallery
Media: Photography, Video installation

The next exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, entitled “Up-Routed,” will include new video installations and photographs by Asya Reznikov. As an adult, Reznikov became an inveterate traveler--moving from and through different cultures, an insatiable recorder of what she sees. She travels with her cameras, still and video, and captures images from around the world of cities, transit systems, buses, planes, trains, people, buildings, and monuments.

In her new videos, an ambitious body of work created over the past four years, the artist incorporates new themes: among them, “domestic” identity and a contemporary interpretation of the Sisyphus myth, aspiring to reach a summit/goal/top, with no exit from a vertical climb of stairs.

Several of the videos utilize the image of stairs and escalators going up and down, an endless loop, perhaps a contemporary Sisyphus trying to ascend and then descend, essentially going nowhere, over and over in a video entitled “No Exit.” In “Dreaming” the artist reclines at the base of a staircase, using her signature suitcase as pillow. She appears to be sleeping, turning over from time to time, changing positions. As she sleeps and dreams, she simultaneously ascends the stairs with heavy suitcase in hand, and descends the stairs, an endless trip; she adds a heavy backpack to the mix. As she dreams, the pattern of her travels is imprinted in her mind and her persona is represented in the weight of her physical burdens, suitcase and backpack. Reznikov shot the stairs in the video on location at the Soviet Memorial in Berlin, while there on a fellowship from Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) from 2006-2008.