Work

«VISIONARY DREAMS #3245-3351» 4 video installations in the halls of the gallery

Anna Frants is a New York-based video and net artist. Usually internet serves as a network that hosts many individual, fully encapsulated, unconnected artistic efforts. These artistic islands, despite occasionally referencing each other, do not form an internet-aesthetic whole. Nor has the internet yet been used as a means to build works of art requiring a high degree of artistic collaboration, not possible in the physical world. Anna Frants is known to work on projects that would bring different artists together, embracing the greatest communication medium that ever existed — the Internet.

Her accomplishments reflect the broad range of interests she has. She has been awarded the top prize for the best 3D computer animation at the prestigious computer graphics competitions such as Autodesk Planet Studio Award. She has participated in and curated numerous art exhibitions in United States and Russia, for number of years have been teaching media studies and animation and also published articles on art. Works can be found in KyoseinoSato Contemporary Art Museum (Japan) and in private collections.

Connecting life as an artist in Russia and in America, Frant’s video is set in a frozen, harsh and unforgiving setting where occupants are filmed amidst routine of working hard to find and claim their daily bread. Among the crowd, one bird has notably different movements and it becomes clear he/she is sick or injured. Set to Beethoven’s Sonata, the impeded pigeon is the weakest in the bunch but nonetheless uniquely different, and thus rises as the star.

1.”Fur die stadt” (for the city). Pigeons foraging in cold snow of St Petersburg this past winter migrate all the way to New York for spring. Anna Frants’ multimedia installations of Russian city street pigeons scavenging for food have landed on both sides of the East River. Undeterred by the bustling public street around them, Frants video/sound projections of feathered city inhabitants went about their business in the front window of Dam Stuhltrager Gallery in Brooklyn at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan and now returned to St. Petersburg’s Borey Gallery.

2.“Made in Ancient Greece, 1928” is second piece from series of freestanding video sculptures that introduces unlikely, from the conservative point of view, but perfect marriage of traditional art form and moving images/ Hollywood style that transformed later to style of Soviet cinema of Stalin era. Ridiculing snobbishness of our conventional thinking, sculpture plays on principles of our vision, time that long term memory takes to pulls out clichés, and perfect proportions of the Greek pottery. Footage was shot in 1928-1936 by young cameraman Vyacheslav Alekseevich Burgov who later became legend of Russian sound technology.

3.”At the double”. Slides, slide projector, sound system What would happen if we didn’t see 30 shots per second (thanks to Lumiere brothers) but registered only the pictures deserving our look? What if we studied to sift this visual trash? Installation ” At the double ” uses the technology of slides, which has already become antique, but as it often happens in art with items from the past, slide-projectors render the idea better than all modern devices.

4.”Nord west”. Interactive video installation. Can one move a cloud? The logic ingrained in how one distinguishes a common setting such as a cloud in the sun’s rays is skewed. By rotating the handle of the mechanism viewer can move cloud or rather cloud’s shadow around the room. Video and sound are utilized to manipulate light, contrast, touch and “reversity” within the installation, producing an environment where nothing is rationally as it is naturally perceived. As spectators enter the frame of projected light- he/she participates in the creation of an image and is transported, on the associative level, to a suggested world by inference.

Borey Art Center December 3, 2009

Vladimir Kozin, Ivan Plyushch, Alexander Terebenin, Olga Rostrosta, Anna Frants, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Andrey Rudiev and Simeon Motolyanets are names of those who write the annals of art life of Russia today, and with whose creative works there appeared an opportunity for students of St.-Petersburg to get acquainted as a part of the Actual Art Program in the end of February – the beginning of March.

The Recycling Project organized by the State Hermitage Youth Educational Center since 19 February till 8 March 2009 is opened in the halls of the Hermitage Youth Educational Center with support of the St.-Petersburg branch of the State Center of Modern Art.

This time authors whose approach essentially differs from irony of soc-art or postmodernist substitution of senses were presented to youth of Petersburg. The generation which was born (and received art education) in the USSR has come to reconsideration of the cultural part as natural if not the only possible basis for new Russian art.

In Letters from the Empire Edge an artist Vitaly Pushnitsky has built sublime ruins of either Roman or Soviet province – from shatters of a firewood shed of his summer house. Material of the Intimate Diary by Shtapakov is not a canvas, but it is an old roofing iron which has been torn off from a roof. It is wrinkled, rusty, covered by spots of an old paint. Traces of a paint and a plaster on the peeled walls form dramatic landscapes without houses, trees and inhabitants in the Skyline Project by Alexander Terebenin. These landscapes are empty and without perspective, this ground is like in the first (or the latest) days of the Creation.

Artist Olga Rostrosta has created a knitted automobile especially for the project. The idea is obvious: the automobile is an object of a dream, a symbol of life success. For the majority of people it is a fruit of work, patience and economy which is got by laborious, persistent daily efforts. At the same time it is a toy, joy, memories about a child merry-go-round . and who does not like fast driving!

Marina Koldobskaya’s project Roman Holidays is devoted to Architecture which is a keeper of historical memory – whatever it was. Images of temples, porticos, arches, columns, bridges are shown like minimalist silhouettes, almost signs. Brought together, they make up a kind of urban landscape – like Rome? The Third Rome? Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad? Or a City as an idea? Meanwhile, wooden doors of dressers, bedside-tables, shelves which were found in old Petersburg houses or simply thrown out by owners became the basis for images. And Anna Frants uses a real Soviet slot-machine of 60th years in Carbonated Water Project, which is a pathetical found thing memorable to us. Computer technologies give a new life to old things. By means of a special facility the antediluvial equipment for water with syrup turns to a stylish multimedia device, some kind of the time machine. A spectator switches on a special device by putting down a coin in it,

and he gets not a glass of soda water, he gets a nostalgic video which shows that time is a relative concept.

The Recycling represents young people creativity of well-known Petersburg artists of the middle generation, and as director of the St.-Petersburg branch of Modern Art Center Marina Koldobskaya notes: “participants of the project perform aesthetic “recycling” as they create new visuality on the basis of images inherited from the Soviet epoch”.

On 22 February at 14:00 Jury Shtapakov, a participant of the project, an artist and a book graphic illustrator, gives a master-class on monotypy for students.

The Hermitage Youth Educational Center
The General Staff
The Palace Square, 6-8, 4 floor
Tel. (812) 710-95-30

The showroom is opened
from 12.00 till 17.30
Sunday from 12.00 till 16.30
Day off – Monday

The State Hermitage Museum July 28, 2009

All over the world, private parties are a fashionable trend and a source of buzz. But in our city, they’ve long since become a routine thing. Sobaka.ru shares nine exclusive events — from Sunday night Mafia games to BBQs with celebrities.

/artist, organizer of the “Cyberfest-2008” festival/

What happens in my apartment on Rubinstein Street is hard to call a classic afterparty: we host gatherings not only after art events, but also just on weekends. The most recent one was dedicated to Cyberfest, an art festival that featured not only real artists, but also cyber-objects — in simpler terms, robots and gadgets — which were used in performances and installations. The afterparty followed the same theme.

This year at Cyberfest, you could see robots created by artist Zlata Panirovska, and at the party, there was an Austrian robot that could mix cocktails. The guest list included both established artists and younger creatives. The party had a very unusual musical background. At my request, photographer Dmitry Shubin learned to play the theremin and accompanied the cyber-artists.

I always take the role of observer. For me, both the performances themselves and the audience’s reactions — as well as the fun — are a kind of game. I know that many people criticize cyber-art, but art must evolve with technology. Progress is inevitable.

Sobaka.RU January 8, 2009