Dasha Afanaseva

I perceive the world being fluid, manifesting in plural realities. I am interested in noticing how these plural worlds co-exist. Landscape is a coincidence of the worlds. In my work, the landscape is present as a conceptual space only hitting at the actual place. The scene in the painting suggests an infinite field beyond the frame. Ideas about plurality could be discussed in that conceptual space. The vastness of the omnipresent landscape equals the scales of everyday life and world historical events. In landscape, histories and individual narratives converge, while characters become emblematic of communal memory or experience. I often come back to the same subject or source image. It stands for plurality, seasons, migration, tides and strain. Painting allows me to comment in a subtle way on these topics to carry conversations across the time and to express my sensibility and responsiveness not only to personal circumstances but also to the wider context in which work is created. As landscape is something always viable in its re-emergence, rehearsing images on the canvas transcends a kind of ‘unresolveness’ to where we find ourselves. I collage and reformulate visual and textual references for my paintings. It is a constructed work: the painterly space is invented, the characters are fictional. I like to think of them as enablers. My intention is to stimulate the perceptual drift by showing things beyond their mere description. That is why images shift between being abstract and allegorical. I try to animate ambiguity and plurality in the pictorial space by layering and painting over to suggest something hidden: another life, another place. Even though the paintings stem from observation or personal circumstance, they are not reflective or nostalgic. I want them to be activating and questioning our perception of the world and our relation to it.