Arkadiy Nasonov : Last Straw, or the Plot Twist
Press Release
What you see is by no means a completed project. It is just a beginning, try-out, laboratory experiments in the genre of "co-spatial" art. These are just the first attempts to cross organisms, called plots or plot lines. Indeed, these blots are similar to the unicellular organisms under a microscope, although, in fact, they are certainly the multicellular ones. At these first stages, of course, I faced many complications that took the form of questions. Does the title always dominate the story? Should one consider a plot within another plot as an equal hero, or is it gradually absorbed into the plot background? How does the more dramatically structured plot contain internal micro-stories? I will have to answer these and hundred other questions in the future. So far, no conclusions... Only questions.
The project consists of three series. All the works depict the blots that represent a metaphor for the change in the plot of the narrative or the consequences of the narrative spreading. The plot spreads not only linearly on the timescale but also upwards, creating a meta-superstructure, and downwards, creating undercurrents of meanings, and it also spreads deep into the hyponoidal depth of hidden meanings.
The first series illustrates the interpenetration of classical plots, when one story spreads out in another one. Plots can interact in many ways. We can say that in these cases it is not characters but stories that already exist in the history of literature that are the heroes of the narrative.
The second series illustrates the situation when the new plots, not yet described, unknown, not tested by literary experience, spread out within the names of classical literary works, thus creating a new semantic combinatorics.
The third series illustrates the "last straw that broke the narrative's back", when the last story drop radically changes the meaning, so that we forget what was before, or rather everything that has been happening until this moment loses its actual meaning.
Arkadiy Nasonov
Born in 1969 in Ekatherinburg, Russia, Arkadiy Nasonov graduated from Moscow Academical Theatre Institute (stage design). Arkadiy Nasonov is linked to the circle of Inspection Medical Hermeneutics group, founded by Pavel Pepperstein in the late 1980s. In 1991 he founded The Cloud Commission art group (with D.Ligeros, T.Detkina, etc.). From 1995 to 1999 he was a member of the TARTU poetry society (together with S.Anufriev, and A.Sobolev). He is also an author of a project Gallery of a Single Visitor.
Arkadiy Nasonov had grants and fellowships such as Grant of Dutch Instute in Rome in 2000, fellowships of La Napoule Art Foundation in 2002, Kunstlerhaus (Worpswede) in 2003. Nasonov’s works are in collections of Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Holland, in Deutschebank collection in Berlin.
His oeuvre perfectly matches the term “psychedelic realism”, it is filled with conceptual hallucinations and esoteric associations. The sources of Nasonov'work can be found in Russian logocentric culture and its literary tradition.
