ALTERED STATES
Adriana Farmiga | Yuri Masnyj
May 29 - June 27, 2021

Mother Gallery is pleased to present Altered States, a two-person exhibition with new work by Adriana Farmiga and Yuri Masnyj. The show features drawings and paintings by Farmiga and sculpture by Masnyj. Altered States runs from 29 May through 27 June 2021. Mother Gallery is located on the ground floor of 1154 North Avenue in Beacon, New York.

In Altered States, Farmiga and Masnyj use their interdisciplinary sensibilities to create works that reexamine the quotidian and our built environment as spaces for meditation on states of matter and states of being.

Farmiga presents a monumental line of inquiry in a series of intimate still life paintings, collectively titled: MOST OF US. The works, installed like a sentence, run along the gallery walls in gradients of blues, recalling water and horizon lines. The blue expanse is punctuated with forms—tenderly rendered in bright colors—from repurposed carpet underlay. Farmiga explains, “Since 2016, I, like many, felt a disruption in the matrix of our collective psyche, and began a durational project that tried to imagine how identity and site can be reexamined.” The drifting shapes of unbodied states track a personal psychogeography—as a generous and fluid space that is ripe for collective reflection and discovery.

Across multiple tables on the gallery floor, Masnyj lays out a Situationist framework populated by assembled sculptures that fall into the categories of: Shelves, Rooms, Figures, and Buildings. Each work is deliberately constructed using both found and formed materials. Masnyj sets up a condition where built forms and spaces become their own containers of meaning. Masnyj explains, “In the last year we’ve become acutely aware of the environments we inhabit and the objects around us, and I was curious to tap into this heightened moment of site.” Masnyj achieves a definitional status for his work by analyzing the relationships between subject and environment, in a method that allows for deep understanding, and eventual synthesis.

The transitory nature of form is central to both Farmiga and Masnyj’s practices. Their works— like states of matter—are in constant flux, awash in an endless ebb of the time that meters everyday life. “A work of art is motionless only in appearance,” writes Henri Focillon, “It is born of change, and it leads on to other changes.” In Altered States, Farmiga and Masnyj shift shapes into signposts, and invite us to follow through worlds without end.

-Paola Oxoa, May 2021