Victoria Lomasko “Unwanted Women” and Phoebe Grip “Lay, Weight”
Ortega y Gasset Projects @ The Old American Can Factory
This event has ended.
The subjects of Victoria Lomasko’s sensitive, insightful portraits include sex workers in Nizhny Novgorod, women in underground lesbian clubs, teachers in a remote village school, and children at the juvenile prison colonies where Lomasko volunteers as an art teacher. Lomasko is a fixture at Moscow’s political trials and protests. Not content to limit herself to the political life of the country’s capital, Lomasko travels around the country and through the former Soviet republics, exploring the domestic, psychological, and spiritual condition of its diverse marginalized groups. With empathy at the heart of her approach, Lomasko is drawn to people who challenge her, whose stories do not necessarily illustrate her own political views. In her graphic reportages, we find a panorama of modern Russian society.
Alongside her continuous artistic and journalistic work, Lomasko has emerged as a prominent feminist among her Russian contemporaries, co-curating The Feminist Pencil, an exhibition and lecture series showcasing women’s socially engaged graphic art. This show, unique in Russia (and beyond) for its non-commercial and political focus, has so far seen four incarnations, two in Moscow, one in St. Petersburg, with a fourth in Oslo, Norway, in May 2014.
Unwanted Women features drawings from her stories on modern slavery in Moscow, the everyday life of sex workers, feminist initiatives in the post-Soviet landscape, the fates of women in the Russian provinces, and repressions against the Russian LGBT community. These real women – migrant workers, feminists, sex workers, elderly women, lesbians – are considered “unwanted women” by their society. “Why am I interested in them?” Lomasko writes in her artist statement. “Because I’m a superfluous woman myself. Both as an unmarried woman with no children, and as woman artist daring to address social and political issues.”
The exhibition Unwanted Women coincides with the publication of Lomasko’s debut collection, Other Russias (n+1, 2017). In addition to being present at the opening of this show, Lomasko will be embarking on a US book tour, which will include a second show of her drawings opening at Carnegie Mellon University on March 20th.
Media
Schedule
from March 04, 2017 to April 09, 2017