Interview by Maximilian Fomichev for NOW magazine, photos by Sergey Misenko. Original article here.
Right now at the Voskhod Gallery in Basel, as part of Art Basel 2023, the solo exhibition of Matiush First’ “Refraction: Are your eyes soaking?” is ongoing.
The NOW editorial team decided to get to know the artist better and tell you about her work.
- Is this your first exhibition organized abroad? Tell me, how long did it take you to get to this point?
- Yes, the first. I started to declare myself as an artist more or less actively in 2018. And at the end of 2022 I found myself in residence outside Russia for the first time - at Atelier Mondial in Basel. This exhibition was the logical conclusion of the residency.
- You work with different media. Tell us which ones were used in this project?
- Graphics. Manual and generative. Everything revolved around the concept of refraction (refraction of light in an optically inhomogeneous medium, for example, the distortion of the appearance of objects when immersed in water) as a metaphor for perceptual processes between the digital and the real. Therefore, it was important for me to combine physical participation and man-madeness, the properties of materials (paper and plastic), sensually inhabiting digital artifacts (scientific visualizations, tracking, and glitch) with the experience of digital distortion of images that make them spatial and deep, turning them into the semblance of a living virtual ocean.
- Has your participation in the Atelier Mondial residency changed your creative vision in any way?
- Being in another country for any extended period of time at all shakes you up a bit. It affects what you do. I must say it was my first time in Europe. You look at some professional components in a completely different way, like open studios, communicating with curators in a different language. I now have a greater desire to do open, interactive things, to get out of the gallery format and find new digital tools for myself.
- What is the main theme of your works? What is the idea behind your work?
- I am always driven by these questions: what kind of relationship are we building today with images, how are they created, what exactly do we see and how do we see it? What can it tell us about ourselves? In some works, the focus is on how what the machines see for us and for us fills the voids in our imagination and memory, synthesizing a picture of the world. In others, trying to weed clear meaning out of familiar things in an attempt to conceptualize their true political charge. Or I try to make the medium, software or device I am using speak, trying to shift the position of the observer from the object itself to the principle of looking at it. I am close to the idea that the perception and production of visual content is a special type of communication and thinking, a special language. I think it is an interesting and worthwhile task to communicate in this language and explore its possibilities, a kind of grounding for the inhabitant of screen culture.
- The digitalization of culture and consciousness is a theme we see almost everywhere. Tell us, why do you think there is still a place for real, living art in our world?
- I'm not contrasting these things. Any technologies can be tools. Art is a field in which they can be used. The camera obscura was once considered cutting edge, and many artists used it. Today, Midjourney and GPT are almost desktop. We have many more handy materials at our fingertips today than ever before - the largest and most interesting sandbox. To make art is to reflect, to hack, to radically change the angle of view on seemingly understandable things. And if digital is a weighty part of everyday life, it is both a space and a way to realize an artistic statement.
- Is digital art a temporary phenomenon? Or is it really the way the world art will develop in the next 50-100 years?
- As long as there is a tool, there will always be someone who will use it in an artistic act.
- What is your favorite mobile app?
Browsers. I'm more of a fan of flailing around weird sites and online archives like the Wayback Machine.
- If you weren't an artist - what would you be?
I think I still have a chance to change careers.
- Your favorite color?
- I like the color schemes of the normal maps. But I wouldn't say there's a particular one.
Voskhod Gallery is located at Post-Passage 9, Basel, Switzerland (entrance from Peter-Merian Strasse). The Matiush First exhibition runs through July 20th
