In his exhibition essay for Anna Parkina’s solo show, Fallow Land, curator John Zarobell describes generic groups of ancient nomads who would burn down forests and return years later to farm the same land. For Parkina, a 31-year-old Russian artist, Zarobell suggests that it’s early 20th-century Russian modernism that should be razed, but the show lacks the same conviction.
Conflicts between artwork and the claims made on its behalf are common, but in this case the artwork itself stutters and goes flat. Parkina uses a combination of paper collage and photo collage, but in the case of this show, the form does little for her. Over and over we see the head and outstretched hand of a boy, a figure wielding a sickle, a Soviet-era apartment building, a car — sometimes as photographs and sometimes as paper silhouettes. Unfortunately, the shapes and pieces are so similar that the work begins to read like tessellated wallpaper in last season’s fashion colors (pale lemon yellow, avocado green, otter brown, and robin’s egg blue).
Luckily there are two sets of works that stand out: the first being three unassuming black-and-white photo-collages (Untitled 8, 9, and 10). Each contains similar subject matter: a worker (or workers) yielding tools, spliced into a hybrid landscape created out of images of snow, spring tree branches, and car hoods. Without the ornamental repetition of the colored-paper, the abstraction of each collage’s component shapes stands out more clearly, declaring itself a question (what constructs a mythology of a place or people?) instead of just a formal game.
