Luba Drozd
Soon enough roads will be rivers
March 20, 2017–June 25, 2017
Reception: Saturday March 20, 6–9pm
Soon enough roads will be rivers, 2017 (detail). 2-channel video, piano strings, custom software, electronics, architectural vellum screens, acetate film screens, 3D printed porcelain. Dimensions variable.
Luba Drozd illuminates the materiality of projected light. Shimmering ultra-thin planes of transparent acetate, vellum and white paper measure the imperceptible thickness of a room as well as framing the inaudible spatial acoustics within it. A piano string reverberates in a corner while pictorial planes are bounced, refracted and interrupted by our own bodies. Trapezoidal shards of light shift as both figure and ground, inside and outside, articulating flatness and perspectival depth. This slippery perceptual condition is one that reveals itself slowly over time, yet one that resists gestalt cohesion.
Indeed for Luba Drozd, it is the effervescent surface conditions of projected light that encourage a persistence of vision. Unveiling the inherent illusionism of cinematic light, Drozd's surfaces cast shadows of doubt that offer suggestions without conclusions, and narratives without plots. Destabilizing normative uses of one-directional cinematic projection, she mobilizes the viewer through an unfolding array of multiple perspectives–an immersive tableau where linear filmic sequence is exploded.
Within the field of the projector's throw, she creates an ineffable space somewhere between the real and the virtual, where invisible weapons are momentarily made visible. While animated objects move against the weightlessness of four-dimensional space-time, we are confronted not only by our own shadows but also by the gravity and density of our own bodies. As we move across and rupture this planar loop Drozd seems to remind us–in uncompromising Friedian theatricality–of the transparent systems of surveillance through which our bodies are implicated in daily. A machine for seeing that modifies perception(1), the projector displays, but it also shoots.
– Alan Ruiz
Luba Drozd earned a BFA from the Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her work has been exhibited at BRIC, Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, and Art in General. She is the recipient of a MASS MoCA Artist Residency, Eastern State Historic Site grant for new work, BRIC Media Arts Fellowship and is currently participating in the Bronx Museum AIM program. Long-term installations are currently on display at Eastern State Historic Site, PA and The Ukrainian Museum, NY.
1. Virilio, Paul, and Patrick Camiller. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1984.