Description
A series of heads is painted on the four walls of the gallery. Leaning between two faces on one long wall is a weathered wooden staircase, a standing male figure painted on its steps.
In one corner, a face spans both walls, nose painted onto a stack of firewood, eyes formed with hypodermic needles. The eyes of the head on the far end of the gallery hold television monitors that play a video-tape made in various spaces throughout the building.
Artist Statement
Frescoes of 'Ancient New York Mosaics' are exaggerated fragments of faces that create the illusion of permanence. The face is an archetypal symbol in any culture. These brick wall iconographic faces recall monumental mosaic portraits from Byzantium and Rome, two decaying cultures with qualities of today's Moscow (the Third Rome, place of our birth) and New York (the New Babylon, where we live now.) The video in the eyes of one of the heads is based on the preposterous correlation of the live and canonized face.
