svetlAna ivAnov

The exterior World comes to us in pieces, from which we alone build a Whole. But who can say whether or not we construct Whole Correctly?

In Svetlana Ivanova's series of photoanagrams from the 1990s, upon confronting and overcoming a personal crisis of mortality, the artist fulfilled her vision of art as repetition and translation, merged with her notion of the double as one who is "together with me, my second 'I.'" The exterior world comes to us in pieces," she has written, "from which we alone build a Whole," and for these striking, often disturbing images she has used a backdrop of appropriately biomorpic surges and swellings for her emotionally-charged, figures wrapped in fetal embrace that, as they may be the kinds of doubles embodied in ghosts, can be equally interpreted as lives, or many lives, in contorted, distended and yet beautiful floating states waiting to be born or preparing to die. And at the end you realize just how microscopically she has let us into her phantasmagorical world.