Time stands still as autumn comes [sold]
2009
oil on canvas
48 x 30 in
Helmsman Divers [sold] Demonstration Experiment Winter Tailwind Skylight [sold] Island Forest Before The Wind Blows Even Colder [sold] For Even If Many Years Unite You, One Day They Will Seem Like Minutes [sold] I went deeper into the forest where the birds sing no more [sold] You can see us in the sky once the clouds have gone to sleep [sold] Time stands still as autumn comes [sold] The evening light chases away the shadows [sold] The Hunt [sold] The Boat [sold]
Winsor Gallery is pleased to present the inaugural Winsor Gallery Award at Concordia University to Vitaly Medvedovsky, who is also the recipient of the 2009 Joseph Plaskett Award.
“My paintings are an attempt to construct imaginary spaces that intertwine autobiographical elements with references to history and mythology, as a way of dealing with issues of memory and displacement. Though my earlier works were faithful representations of real people and places in the former Soviet Union, where I was born, over time I have grown more interested in creating my own spaces and stories. While maintaining an overall nostalgic sensibility, these works began to incorporate more and more imagery from my present-day life, as well as from a variety of other sources, resulting in increasingly cryptic, anachronistic environments. This process led to my current body of work, where I use myself and my friends as a cast of “actors” – neither children nor adults - reenacting ambiguously playful narratives in front of “backdrops” that combine historical and contemporary, European and North American elements, bridging the gap between two important periods in my life.
My family left the USSR in 1990, and the country itself fell apart a few months later – which gave me the right to say with complete honesty that I come from a country that doesn’t exist. The immediate result was an eternal awkwardness in answering the simple question “Where are you from?” – born in Ukraine, in a Russian speaking household to ethnic Jewish parents, I was everything and no one at the same time. But I’ve also realized that this unique situation has given me the artistic freedom to superimpose anything on that blank spot in my biography, and create a pseudo-historical, completely imagined world, which I can nevertheless claim as a part of my own heritage, if only because I cannot really be held accountable for its veracity, as there is nothing to compare it against.”
- Vitaly Medvedovsky