Anastasia Romanova
Untitled (2022)
I believe that the best source of art materials and inspiration is our day-to-day life. I start with an object or experience that enchants or surprises me in some way: a natural phenomenon, an ambiguous material, a sweet memory, or just the place I'm at. I sit with it, play with it, live with it until it starts to connect with its surroundings. I prefer it when those connections surprise me, and they often occur at the level of form. I like to accentuate similarities, 'visual rhymes' between unrelated objects: a leaf might resemble a topographic map; cafeteria pancakes live in my studio as mushrooms; my moms dumplings fold like body parts; my friend is briefly a tree. I reinforce these similarities in the ways I arrange, install, and alter my objects. The medium can be paint or sculpture, trash, food, or photographs. The resulting pieces are rooted in curiosity and inject imaginative wonder back into day-to-day life. The themes might seem diverse at first, but the more work you see the more cohesion you start to notice: the materials and the emotions are both complex and familiar. Another thing that remains constant is transformation. My work grows and decays, sometimes literally: I often use living or recently deceased matter as material. Even when the material is synthetic, it tends to resemble a living thing, or a living thing's leavings. And that perpetual change, the exhilarating and unsettling flux of living, carries with it the ambivalent, complex but familiar feelings I'm after: yearning to be something you can never be; love for your friends; missing being someone's friend; the desire to belong; excitement about the future; and fear of the future.