Downtown Manhattan in March. Photo by Alëna Adamson
Blood Moon Total Lunar Eclipse was happening in the first hours of 3.14 Pi Day. New York City residents dreamt of weird stuff. The ones who pulled an all-nighter acted violent towards themselves. Anxiety and paranoia.
Sin city pays for its shady life choices.
NASA image shows the phases of the lunar eclipse
The skies turned peachy, buildings - faded grey. I forced myself out of my room. I walked west
“Don’t ever leave your room!” - said Joseph Brodsky. He continued:
“Let nobody but the room
know what you look like. Incognito ergo sum,
as substance informed its form when it felt despair.
Don’t leave the room! You know, it’s not France out there”.
It’s Brooklyn, and I call it home. It’s been 4400 days since I’ve arrived. 12 years ago or so. Sunsets are nice. I like the pizza sign doubled-up and reflected in a parked car. What else?
Before moving here, I imagined myself owning a photo studio. Figuratively speaking, my initial dream of NYC started in an empty cyclorama space in my head. Now I’m traumatized by it. I start walking faster when I see photo equipment in street windows.
What attracts me the most is towers.
They seem so stable. Not bothered by anything. Strong.
I’d like to be strong one day.
One Sunday afternoon I followed The Highline abandoned rail road, drowning in fluffy spikelets. There it was: a divine multicolored terrarium.
The dichroic glass structure transformed New York downtown views into a puzzle. I couldn’t walk away from this distorted multidimensional reality created by a Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. Reflections change depending on an angle you’re looking at it from. The image refraction concept reminded me that life circumstances have no value, really. Just like the fern inside we get stuck in a particular way of thinking. «It all depends on how you look at things and not how they are in themselves» - Carl Jung.
When everything suddenly loses its meaning, exposing the void of a human existence - I place myself in between of two Warhol’s noses: big and small, Before and After, [4]
The artwork’s replica used to hang on my tiny NYC kitchen’s wall, left there by previous residents, my friends. The original 1962 canvas is on view at Whitney Museum, it’s 6 feet tall - serves as a perfect backdrop for a selfie. I go there on a Friday night, for free.
After a spin of noses I approach a big-chested bronze mama - the sculpture just around the corner. A “Standing Woman” by Gaston Lachaise.
I count graceful ladyfingers — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This woman is in charge.
The pretty colored painting next to her is a portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney - American sculptor and art collector, the Whitney Museum’s founder. I stare at her in awe: all my favorite color combinations, silks. The poetry…
Feeling lostNext moment - foundTrapped in New York undergroundElevator “A” to “One”Dirt and rats - next level. Done?
Selfie with a Soviet poster
Harlem Art Sale, Oct. 3rd 2024
My whole life I worked in newspapers. There was a dark storage room in Tambov Courier editorial office with piles and piles of weekly issues. Floor-to-ceiling rows of A3 trash. Typography excess - two years archive. Headlines and news columns rotting unattended, unopened. I was a 17 years old reporter with an ambition of a photographer, even artist perhaps, and I sneaked into that room once. I had a camera on a tripod with me. I’ve heard a mouse rustling some pages. It smelled like dry bread and instant coffee. I had a vision of myself positioned comfortably upfront, with the Archive Paper Giant in the background, in all its glory.
Surrounded by printed words doomed for an infinite storage incarceration.
These days I have my own newspapers archive. New York Post daily issues, from January to May 2024. Each one of them traveled from a News Corp building on MTA train with me while I was working there in a photo department. I went through hundreds of articles, creepy news and crime reports, selecting juicy meanings, very special to me. I checked out mugshots and celebrity galleries, I remembered Andy Warhol - he loved tabloids and copied front pages obsessively, with a pencil.
I’m not here for the pencils. I like cut-outs and neon paints. I see these headlines as a part of my identity now. They are reminders of those days. They are memories of loud newsroom talks. They are my emotions experienced on a day of the paper release. And it’s all saved in print and released to the public.
I glue them onto canvases and tell my own tales. I feel so seen.
Creating an art piece is not enough. Just like a newspaper, it has to find its reader. And so my performance has been taken to the streets.
It was a lively Friday night in Harlem, I put my collages and paintings on display, I worried. A fat rat ran by, I thought of luck. I kept working on canvases adding headlines - ignoring rodents and thinking of 2023 Rat Czar story - where is she now? Yesterday’s news. The headlines are still here though. People stopped by and asked questions. Mostly about rats. But they also just wanted to know my story. The truth is, such experiences cannot be kept in a dark room with the dreadful future. They look much better on brick walls, exposed.
07.03.2023 photo by K. Ross
06.16.2024
“Assimetry” - view of The Cloisters, June 13th 2024
What would you do finding yourselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate lost humans with the power of their minds? While you’re desperately trying to figure out what’s going on they are engaged in their own domestic intrigue and won’t rest your brain. You are just very confused and want to leave, but it seems impossible - it’s just this scary dream you were chosen to watch. But you are also curious AF (and easily manipulated by fairies). Would you run away? Take deep breaths?
“Beatrice, 26 foor” 2016 - Self-portrait
You see, in the Fairyland nightmare dimension everyone is just so terrible at playing their roles that you start to laugh hysterically as if it meant to be a comedy. But it is not. And so your new master friends don’t like it and get really mad.
“Zoom-in Error” - The Cloisters, 2024 / View from Beatrice Apartments, 2016
You can sense that there’s some danger in the air, but also doubting your own fear as you start to think it’s just a dream in an unfortunate afternoon nap.
It is June Thirteen 2024 in New York City, and it got really hot today. Siesta!