Subjective Objects
Stas Orlovski is a Los Angeles artist who employs subtle palettes to produce effects far beyond the relatively modest size of his works. He assembles wind, wave and water patterns from Japanese woodcuts; flora and fauna from Victorian books; and abstracted geometric figures from Russian Suprematism to create small theaters or filmscreens replete with birds, butterflies, moons, forests, and fragmented statues, (especially balloon-shaped featureless heads). Comparisons with Paul Klee and Joseph Cornell come to mind, but also with Dadaist/Surrealist collagists like Max Ernst, Bruce Conner and Lawrence Jordan. With the current show, обjект, the artist continues to expand beyond drawing, painting, printmaking and collage into animations projected onto his sculptures, continuing the cinematic turn of his earlier work, Troika, in 2016; like William Kentridge and Tony Oursler, he enlists 21st century technology to pursue his vision, transforming an “iconography of nostalgia” into compelling “dream-like objects.”
обjект is a hybridized English-Cyrillic spelling of ‘object,’ and hybridization is the theme here, with drawings and ‘illuminated’ sculptures, sometimes of the same motif, engaged in dialogue. “Feet With Flags” is a sepia-toned ink drawing of two mannequin feet set atop a shelf or pedestal and outfitted with blank flags, one rectangular, one triangular, both blown forward, as if by a tailwind. A sculpture of the same feet probably predates the drawing; amplifying the absurdity of these obedient marching metonyms is the fluttering cloth projected on the flags. The antique mannequin torso of “Figure with Suprematist Composition” has a hollowed-out abdomen in which we see jostling geometric forms, like the battling Whites and Reds of revolutionary Russia as represented abstractly, briefly, in contemporaneous political posters. Also shown are four of Orlovsky’s Arp-like heads, two painted and two sculpted and enriched with projections; and a half-dozen landscapes of the artist’s inner world projected on the outer. A large Orlovski installation is coming to San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art in November. обjект runs through May 25; Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley, Thu-Sat 10--4 and by appointment (510) 527-1214; traywick.com. —DeWitt Cheng
