Masha. Forest. 7 Painting

There is a certain presumption of integrity, delegated to the nature and traditionally embodied as a sight of the landscape. Equally habitually, we contrast nature’s entirety with architecture, fragmenting space, and in general all our culture and civilization, as something extra-natural and splitting the world. However, in the installation by Fedora, we see first of all the disintegration and fragmentation of natural wholeness, we apprehend its unity as an artificial construction with missing parts. Visually, Fedora Akimova’s installation by means of traditional painting imitates the technogenic optics of photography. Yet, this painting is disturbed by needlework, depriving the picture of the medial uniqueness and turning it into a semiotic chimera, hovering between the picture and the object. Even more chimerical are the images of animals, which embroidery on canvas places in the landscape idyll as if made to interpret them through the code of the Russian magical forest. However, immediately in them appear impossible fusions of bodies of predators and herbivores, sometimes even birds. Moreover, the very substance of their loosely embroidered bodies is obviously from another world, more likely from the world of spirits and images than from the forest surrounding them. They are made from the same substance as dreams, although without Shakespeare's or human passions in general. But the paradox is that, that like embroidery, they belong to a reality common to the embroiderer and viewer, and therefore closer to our world than the convincing illusion of painting. (Alexander Evangely)