DEEPEST LIGHT – Anastasia Alekseevna’s art for beginners, by Jarkko Rasanen
Anastasia Alekseevna is above all an artist of light and shadow, although her works show both feminist and body-political strata – or even perspectives of the other species, even though I would rather read these traits as symbolism. Light and shadow are primarily tools for her, but I think Marshall McLuhan’s slogan “Medium is the message” fits well in this context: Alexeevna allows the stages of her technology-driven work processes to act as radiant metaphors that guide the meaning formation of works. Her media-archeological medium choices lead to states of consciousness like time-travel, but still devoid of nostalgia. It is actually a kind of arte povera-spiritual economy: Alexeevna's art studies and optimizes the expressive potential of so-called “obsolete” devices with a contemporary mindset. Time-consuming manual processes produce bright pictorial thinking that has been stripped of everything in vain – even to the point that the contents of the works escape verbalization. They do not take a stand, but take for granted the potential of the image space: the details that challenge Western vision resemble the absolute reality outlined in the scientific imagery. The light of consciousness and the shadow of the unconscious draw a picture of the abandoned skins of spiders or snakes as evidence of the transformations of life in her photograms and serigraphy. On the other hand, as John of the Cross points out, the inner light of the soul is the only light in the Dark Night – which is a prerequisite for the splendor of light paintings of the artist that draw from abstract expressionism.
The alchemical relationship between the body and the universal is repeated in her production – as above, so below. Works referring to the micro and macrocosm are associated with either cells or celestial bodies in terms of their formal language. In Sweet Pain, the artist exposes her own body to a painful ritual of cleansing, which on the other hand has also become the mainstream of sexual fetishes: pubic hair is mixed with the molten sugar that is used for the removal process on photo paper resulting again in reminiscents of cosmic landscapes. Alekseevna’s technical dexterity and emphasis on details is second to none – it reminds me of Wittgenstein’s absoluteness in his furniture design. The severity of the artist towards herself also requires the viewer to sincerely surrender to the works, which in the end only give clues to the secret under your eyes. They go – as we say in Finland – around it, like cat goes around hot porridge.