Tatyana Kazakova: “Afterland”
- Eye Level
- 18 hours ago
- 5 min read
A trip to the wilderness in our backyard — and in our hearts.
Artists have been rebelling against the frame for a long time. Painters put borders around their pictures and are immediately filled with an overwhelming urge to shatter them. Never mind that it is the artist herself who imposes the limits. Her images push hard against the lines that confine them anyway. Sometimes the pot boils over and the work spills over the frame and into the white space beyond, or drips down the edges and on to the walls.
This is not true of every artist. Some are content to keep what they’re depicting within clear boundaries. But I’m always happy to see an artist throw a few fierce elbows against the frame. I think it speaks well of her when she does. It means she possesses the contempt for restriction that all great art depends upon. Take Tatyana Kazakova, for instance. She doesn’t rage against the machine. She doesn’t have to. She can just direct her ropy vines to grow all over it. Those gears grind to a halt in no time.
In “Afterland,” now at IMUR Gallery (67 Greene St.), Kazakova is in charge of the thickets and brambles. But if she’s the boss of them, she’s a respectful one. She admires their unruliness and their obedience to the growth principle. When she has to put a border around her paintings and pencil drawings of wild nature, she’s a little apologetic about it. But soon enough, the leaves and branches are extending beyond the rectangle, climbing the frame like ivy or sagging, moss-like, toward the floor.
Her plants are meticulously realized in graphite and densely packed with visible traces of the life force evident. Her two-dimensional drawings appear to have depth, midsummer lushness, and certain Little Shop of Horrors voraciousness. They’re busting out of their enclosures like yard plants after a rainstorm. One rectangle is dense with ferns. Fiddleheads curl past the corners of the picture, tickling the white space between the image of the planter and the frame. In another, wiry trees itch and scratch at the edges of their frame. Kazakova’s grey gardens can’t be cropped. They sneer at the pruning shears.
But wilderness this isn’t. The “Afterland” plants aren’t reminiscent of deep woods. Instead, they’re suggestive of urban overgrowth: accidental plots between highways and overpasses, lots reclaimed by verdure, marginal areas unmolested by work crews. Kazakova has a point to make about the speed with which plants will take over if they’re given a little breathing room. In “Sleepy Day in the Park,” the slumberers, apparently, are the maintenance crews: great heaps of vegetation crowd the foreground and engulf the small clearing in front of a guardrail. A single bench is half-occluded by a giant bush.
In “Rhododendron Weave,” black lashes with flowers attached whip out at the viewer. It’s dramatic, dangerous, and more than a bit sexy. Was the well-meaning horticulturist who planted the seed consumed by the energies unleashed? Or did it simply get away from him? Either way, he’s out of the picture and the rhododendrons are in control.
Then there are the plants that simply will not sit still in a frame. Kazakova has granted each of these restless specimens a square of its own. On these tiles, the artist has drawn a single bloom, or leaf, or shoot, and then flipped it over and affixed a single word — generally an abstract noun or a state of being — to the piece. “Afterland” is busy with these talismans: the artist has slapped scores of them on the staircase leading to the second floor gallery and hung others on thin strings attached to the ceiling. These pendants ride the air currents in the room, showing their floral faces before gently turning to reveal their conceptual sides.
The artist’s words are reassuring, but the plants she’s drawing are pretty wild, sporting saw-like petals, alien fronds, intricate folds suggestive of genitalia, and hard biological cases. As you tiptoe through the hanging squares, each about the size and thickness ofer a drink coast, little windows in the organic world open and shut. No matter how deep the roots go, Kazakova’s forest is on the move.
That feeling of transience returns in “Dusk in the Adirondacks,” one of the show’s largest pieces and a work that sits at the intersection of fertility and disquiet. In the foreground is a blanket of clover, gorse, and flowering plants, each one drawn with attention to the curve of the leaves and the summertime lassitude that visits meadows worldwide. The drama gives way to a riverside where water laps in thick, weary ripples, and the setting sun streaks across the surface with the single-minded purpose of a child making a chalk mark.
In the distance stands a great tilting mountain of scrub growth, or maybe a building overcome and dragged into the water by plants. Whatever it is, it lists at a provocative angle. Tall trees and withered trunks reach into space on either side of the husk. It’s as if a torn landscape is opening up to disgorge an alien shape.
Eeriness also suffuses a set of acrylic paintings on large sheets of paper. Once again, it’s the peculiar reflective quality of rivers and their tendency to answer back with incomplete information that makes these pieces feel as strange as they do. In “Leaning Into the Water,” a white trunk, curved like a stretching spine, emerges from a cloud of pink foliage that dominates the top half of the canvas. The bottom part is the glassy lake, meeting branch with branch and bend with bend.
Yet it is less a mirror than it is an echo. The water picks and chooses details it wants to mimic, distorts others, and omits others altogether. That this is a metaphor for memory is immediately apparent. It’s also what happens to us when we enter the thicket and surrender to the logic of the woods. Here, everything is growing according to its own internal compass, stretching out into blank space, aggressively claiming territory, pushing against the frame of the day. There’s no time or patience for perfect symmetry. Conditions are changing too fast for that. Allusions and refractions are all we’re going to get.
“Afterland” follows “In Spite of Our Fears,” a three-floor blowout exhibition of Tatyana Kazakova’s work mounted at the Grover House in Caldwell, NJ. “Fears” was a heavy show in the best sense of the word, heavy like King Crimson is heavy prog, tackling death, mourning, and the constant and pitiless renewal of the earth. Nobody got out of that gallery unperturbed. Superficially, “Afterland” seems like a gentler experience. Yet it turns out that Kazakova is working with many of the same ideas. The flowering plant, gentle in contour but perennial and constantly refreshing itself, is likened to the female body. The built environment is surrounded by overwhelming natural forces. And whatever is there in the frame can’t be confined for long.
(IMUR Gallery is open from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursday and Friday and from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. on Saturday.)
