All author's works
Series
Alisa Gorshenina builds her own personal mythology, drawing inspiration from folk culture and unconscious arbitrary associations. An important source of creative energy and imagery for her is free experimentation and play; she invents neologisms and describes the content of her work with reference to metaphors of corporeality and motifs of the spiritual journey. This is what she says of the “Huarealism” series: “Here I am dividing myself into 7 equal Alisas and playing “ring-around-the-rosy” with myself. Here I am enlarging myself to the size of the highest mountain in the Urals and laying down in the forest as if in the grass. Here I am a spaceship, able to fly anywhere, to overcome any universe. I choose the one I like by color, look for the best planet and take all the stars from its sky, put them in my pocket, and instead I place my own sun in the sky, I just sewed it yesterday. Now I have my own planet, for there is my star there now. Here I am becoming a rag doll with six arms, standing on a shelf and realizing what it is like to be a man-made object. Here I am drawing a mermaid’s tail on a summer photograph, and in the same instance I am in the sea, cutting through the waves like a fish. Here I am dancing and splitting into atoms and becoming music. I am lying on the Moon, looking at the Earth and wondering what people are doing there now.”
Alienated
Series
Language experimentation is one of Alisa Gorshenina’s key creative methods. In order to define her artistic practice, she invents the term “Russian Alienated” to symbolize both a commitment to local identity, folklore motifs and the detachment of a young artist currently living in Nizhny Tagil. “Russian Alienated” is not so much a series as a creative manifesto, but images of folk culture such as lace, tiles, scarves and sarafans are put together into a kind of selfie-amalgam: they appear in the artist’s self-portraits, constructing her problematic, bricolage identity. In her interviews she defines it this way: “A lot of people think that ‘Russian Alienated’ is something apocalyptic, something about the confrontation between the Russian people and modernity, about all of us and about Russia. But it’s not at all my style to raise such global themes, so ‘Russian Alienated’ is about me.” This new, subjective perception of national and cultural identity becomes a sign of a very special, individualistic patriotism.
