Seeing Silence: by day
Some time ago, I began listening to the radio more frequently than audiobooks. World news seemed so insane to me that the plot twists of fiction could not rival them. As of late, the events have gotten darker. Listening to the radio while I draw feels strange. Drawing is my way to escape and go down the tunnel of my imagination. The sound of news keeps pulling me back into reality. The exercise is like a tug of war. Once I noticed that my drawings began to reflect reality, I switched off the radio. In this series, I allowed myself to take a break from the world. I turned off the radio and listened to the silence of my studio, wondering what that silence would look like. I thought of snow-covered birch trees. The image cradled me into sleep and haunted me in my dreams
Seeing Silence: by day
2024
Pen and ink on paper
150inch x 40inch
$30,000
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Video Of Work
Seeing silence: by night.
My friend's grandmother worked at an airport in the USSR. At the back of her office hung a gold curtain that concealed a stash of top-secret documents about the airport’s operations. One day, a colleague came into the grandmother’s office, dreaming of new trousers.
At the time, the Soviet Union was known for both its secrecy and ubiquitous shortages.
Wouldn’t the gold curtain make the most perfect trousers? Her colleague bundled up the fancy fabric and promised to return with a replacement.
Weeks passed. The colleague sewed the trousers but failed to find a new curtain. Finally, she returned, presenting her golden trousers to the grandmother. Her appearance coincided with a surprise audit at the airport. When the director entered the office with a squad of inspectors, he immediately noticed that the curtain had gone. As the grandmother fumbled for excuses, his eyes fell upon the gold trousers.
He turned to the inspectors, declaring that the secret documents must be moved to an office with a door separating them from the world. And so the gold trousers, symbolic of secrecy and ingenuity, brought an end to the role of the gold curtain.
During the WWII, my grandfather worked in a bullet factory. The facility never made bullets larger than 10mm in circumference. Amid the direst moments of the war, the factory received an unprecedented order for a giant 10x10-meter bullet-like-sphere. My grandfather wondered why such a vast object had landed on the factory floor. When he asked, no one was willing to talk about it. Decades later my father visited the factory. He saw that in the same room was the 10-meter sphere, untouched. It turned out that the order resulted from a monumental mistake. In the rush of wartime production, the secretary had omitted to add the second "m" for cubic millimeters when ordering the bullet. As a result, the factory was sent an order for a sphere measuring 10 meters in diameter instead of the intended 10 millimeters. In the oppressive atmosphere of the Stalin era, only a fatalist would ask questions. The enormous sphere personifies Stalin’s oppressive regime. It sits in the factory to this day.
Seeing Silence: by night
2024
Pen and ink on paper
150inch x 40inch
$30,000
Video of Work
Sound of Silence: my thoughts got the better of me.
2024
Pen and ink on paper
57inch x 44inch
$8,000