Vera Iliatova: Академия (Akademiya)

About

Академия -- transliterated as akademiya -- translates to the English word academy, meaning an elite scholarly institution. Iliatova intentionally chose Cyrillic script for the exhibition’s title to emphasize the conceptual connection to a specifically Russian notion of this type of institution. With this in mind, one particular influence on Iliatova’s recent work, and the entry point into the world of Iliatova’s imagined academy, are the writings of Lidia Charskaya. Charskaya was a novelist popular with young women in pre-revolutionary Russia who was later disavowed in the Soviet Era and died in poverty. Typically set in boarding schools for elite girls, Charskaya’s novels told the tales of friendship among women and featured fiercely independent female characters on the hunt for adventure. The halls and grounds of these fictional academies provide the backdrop for the scenes that unfold in Iliatova’s psychically charged canvases. 

Although time and place are not immediately obvious in Iliatova’s paintings, there is a more modern aspect to the style of dress and types of locations in Iliatova’s fantastical scenes. Iliatova grew up in Leningrad, Russia but left for the United States, first for South Brooklyn, then Silicon Valley, at the age of sixteen.The vaguely civic, utilitarian architecture, the hints of a uniform, and the sense of a shared social fabric, all loosely ​​rendered in the style of socialist realism, casts an eye back to Iliatova's upbringing under the final years of communism. 

The social effects of immigration can be felt in the works on view. Each painting contains many layered narratives and the subtle shifts in color require the viewer to take their time to adjust their eyes to the mise en scene. There is a kind of visual assimilation required to view, echoing Iliatova’s own experience as a young woman caught somewhere between a new American reality, her memories of Russia, and an anxious nostalgia for what her life might have been like had she remained. 

There is a distinctly theatrical element to her process. Iliatova paints from life and poses her own body to inhabit the role of each young woman or girl that populates her paintings. Each figure is provided with a found or thrifted wardrobe and props, like flowers or bolts of fabric, for their scene. American pop culture  has also played a role in shaping the stories that unfold. Iliatova’s knack for depicting impending social drama is straight from the screens of American high school television series such as The OC, Veronica Mars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The angst and complex teenage interpersonal relationships between women that fuel these TV dramedies simmers just beneath Iliatova’s canvases, only bubbling to the surface long enough for us to glimpse a striking detail: a cigarette lit between classes, a clandestine gossiping session, a terrible fall. 

Iliatova reimagines and recycles the melodramatic tropes that drive the lives and actions of Charskaya’s young women and reinterprets them through the lens of American teen television. The resulting paintings are a mix of high and low, of east and west, of real and imagined, mirroring the multitudes that exist within the artist as she finds herself caught between worlds.