Galina Shevchenko is a multimedia artist and educator working across multiple modes of expression and image processing. Fluid, elusive and illusory entity of her video-scapes and permeable transparency of her constructed objects and environments manifest her ongoing exploration of post-feminist identity through mediation. Galina holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Chicago. Her recent exhibitions include the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art (Moscow), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Hamilton MAS (Felixstowe, England) The Franklin (Chicago), and California State University (Fresno CA). Galina is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Multimedia Design at Harold Washington College.
Website and Links: instagram @instantgalina
website: http://www.galinashevchenkosequences.com/ , https://newart.city/show/we-will-survive-as-hybrids
Artist Statement:
My work is preoccupied with processing the image of a body in its beautiful disobedience: androgynous, animal, non/post human, alive and visceral, a grotesque body of a Mother-Monster ever loving and procreating. My practice encompasses multiple modes of expression and image processing: precision of digital fabrication, visceral materiality of embroidery, animation, video matter, and augmented reality.
My Monsters - Mothers inhabit the liminal world of primordial desire. Mothers in production, queer and playful embryos and embryo carriers, primordially ancient omnipotent cyborgs. Their bodies are altered, transforming, rebellious and excessive. I am interested in creating iconographic taxonomies that transcend the human condition of “new normal” into visually exquisite grotesque constructions: young and mothered, aged and diseased, loving and loved.
Through multiple modes of processing of the image of the body, I am attempting to evoke our constant physical and cross/cultural condition of seduction, desire, intimacy, disease.
Exquisite, expressive lines and reflections put the work into constant rhizomatic becoming, immersing, and extruding: emulating human condition, contaminating, contracting and expanding space and time. My world is the utopian happy seductive, and irresistible ecosystem. I cannot help procreating, mothering, populating. My constructions are self-portraits, bodies in flux ever becoming and transitioning across media, carrying art historical references, and looking into the future.
My matter is virtual but apparent through visceral movement. It is a vibrant digital matter.
I am working in cross-mediated plurality, subverting media in my exploration of the fabric of human body, overlapping patterned repetition of cultural archetypes, connecting them into sequential knowledge, creating a parallel universe and living one, being a laboratory subject, yet extending the liminal space and offering possibilities for survival and agency.