9 Faces of Guilt is a series of paintings based on photos of Russian drug offenders taken by the police at the moment of their capture and displayed on a police website. Unlike mug shots, these photos were taken at the location where they were arrested.
I use oil paints transparently or with unfinished areas, revealing the imperfections and artifice that underlie the image because I seek to explore the uncomfortable relationship between the subject and the person looking at them, myself included. For this series, I drew from the history of Russian art: icons, textiles and realist painting.
Pleasure and pain, intimacy and voyeurism, fear and beauty: caught in the tug of war of oppositional forces, I believe the most interesting place is the space in between. Because that is where the experience of humanity that we all understand is found. |
