Review by Alison Bing: 'Past Lives Personal Exorcisms"

Excerpt from Alison Bing’s review ‘Past Lives Personal Exorcisms show at the Blackbird space’, published in Artweek.

Once you’ve seen Linder and Syjuco’s works, Marina Shterenberg’s Improbable seems like a very hard title to live up to; it’s hard to match Dada and deadpan for surprise factor. But her installation is cleverly built into a corner, and peering through slats cut in the wall reveals a tiny man staring at an arch as though he doesn’t know quite to make of it. His architectural bafflement echoes our own in what is perhaps best described as a double folly – a conceptually discombobulating experience indeed. It’s the feeling you might get watching your video game avatar enter an endless hallway, or shaking a snow globe containing the Seattle Space Needle inside the Seattle Space Needle gift shop. The uneasy parallels Shterenberg posits here suggest a fractal geometry of human experience, revealing linkages among seeming difference as well as difference among seeming linkages. Any work with the audacity to play conceptual poker with Einstein and Derrida and then up the ante deserves the title Improbable.

Reviews

By Jamie Windborne

Marina Shterenberg opens up your space with works of art that create a cold void beckoning you to re-connect with a paradise lost. Loneliness is not all that her work provokes. She seeks to create an urgency of reconciliation between you and your space through her work.

Working mostly with oil, epoxy and ink on canvas, Shterenberg draws upon her past in the Ukraine to depict dimensions of dreamy and ethereal settings that summon a reconciliation of lost boundaries for the viewer.

Shterenberg explained she creates with a feeling of light and how that light fills a space. “I feel that I am a constructionist in the way that society can be influenced by architecture,” she said. “My work is the reverse process—the drawing beneath the painting … transparent, amorphous, ever changing …”

Emphasizing the artistic process over end result, Shterenberg said her central quality is found through the many stages her paintings go through. She uses epoxy as a cold material to distance the onlooker. “This, it seems, accentuates the viewers’ loneliness,” she admitted. “It acts as a veil, not intentional, but mysterious.”