Review of Flomenhaft Gallery Art Show

Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin

When I walked into the gallery, the very first art pieces I saw were those of Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin. Three very beautiful and mysterious pieces too realistically captured to look like a painting, hung side by side in the corner of the gallery. All three of the art pieces captured the face of a young, white woman; the same face in all three pieces. There was always some sort of symbol on her face—a bird, a Greek-like letter and in the last painting, a spiral line and around it the roman numerals: XII, III, VI, IX.

In one of the pieces, the woman had a bird tattooed on her forehead. Her face was covered with braided hair aligned to form some sort of helmet. To me, the hair was to represent a helmet, like the ones hockey players wear to protect themselves. The bird was a manifestation of freedom; the woman in the art piece wished for freedom but wants to protect herself from the possible dangers of the outside world. I told my interpretations to a classmate who pointed out that the hair I was calling a helmet resembled a torture mask he saw in a museum on his trip to Berlin. And I thought, but why the hair and the braids? Hair, representing beauty could be the “torture mask” that is keeping women, in general, from being who they wished to be. I connected this with the stereotype that women are supposed to be beautiful and behave in a feminine way and how that might be suffocating.

The second art piece was of the same woman. Her hair in the artwork was not braided but instead, loose and created a veil over her face with an indecipherable symbol tattooed onto her forehead, similar to the way the bird was drawn onto her face in the first work. The way she is letting her hair cover her face reminds me of the way I would let a section of my hair cover part of my face when I don’t want the professor to notice me to answer a question. Her eyes looked somber and she is glancing down. Because I couldn’t understand the symbol, I could not understand why she was letting her hair dangle in front of her face.

In the last piece, the girl had a spiral line and around it the roman numerals: XII, III, VI, IX drawn on her face. The roman numerals were those on a clock—12, 3,6,9. I interpreted the piece to represent aging and with it comes deteriorating beauty. I also saw it to represent a woman’s biological clock and the fear that comes with becoming too old to have children.

After I made my interpretations, I researched the artists. The two artists, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin were leading proponents of the Samizdat art movement, which was formed to circumvent official censorship in the former Soviet Union. Rimma’s face is central to the artworks, which are photographs. They are used for personifications of different stages of psychological and visionary experience (“Fabric of America”). “By presenting visual and textual conundrums, they invite the viewer to participate in unraveling the paradox, thus forming a bridge to spiritual and mystical transformation.” (Sloan, Curator)

The first photograph was captioned, “Bird: Self-enclosed spirit, or beating against the bars of one’s own mental cage.” Here, freedom is personified into a bird and this sense of freedom is trapped behind the bars of a mental cage, which could symbolize fear. It is very interesting to compare my interpretations with the artists. The second photo is captioned: “Real: seems from behind our own veils. It is only when we wake from a dream that we know we have been dreaming.” I looked at the complex symbol on the photo again and I begin to see the letters that spell out “Real.” Gerlovina and Gerlovin plays with the concept of fantasy versus reality and implies that only a thin veil separates the two dimensions and how things may not be what they appear; “it is only when we wake from a dream that we know we have been dreaming.” The last painting by the artists is captioned, “Spiral Clock: It is believed by most that time passes; may be it stays where it is. ‘Never was time it was not.’” The phrase, “Never was time it was not” seemed just as perplexing as the photo.

All of the art pieces at the art gallery were beautiful and breathtaking. I enjoyed analyzing the works and asking myself what the artist wanted to convey in his/her work. It was also interesting to hear different classmates’ interpretations on the paintings as well because there is no “correct” way of interpreting art.