OLEXANDER WLASENKO | ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE
March 22 – April 17, 2005
Artist’s Talk and Opening Reception Tuesday March 22, 7 pm
“My studio production focuses on a personal and investigative discourse surrounding drawing’s relationship to lens‑based media (i.e. photography, cinema) in modern culture. The images I choose to work with trigger involuntary and perhaps atavistic memories. In relation to this, I perceive the films and photos I draw from as touchstones for retrieving a dislocated cultural memory. And yet they are not my memories, and to some degree, nor are they vehicles of my “culture”. They are one step, one generation, removed. In this regard, they act as metaphors for displacement. My latest series of drawings entitled Another Time, Another Place began in 2001. This project takes its inspiration from European cinema, citing a range of vintage 60s film. The drawings capture discrete moments from light Italian comedies, Ukrainian folk tales and Soviet documentaries. The latter two sources feature imagery from my domestic repository of films. On the other hand, the Italian sources were found.”
– excerpted from the Artist’s Statement
Biography
Olexander Wlasenko was born in 1972 in Oshawa, Ontario where he continues his art practice and is the Assistant Curator and Curator of historical photography at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Wlasenko has exhibited across Ontario in Toronto, Kingston, Stratford, Bowmanville, Guelph and London. He exhibited nationally in Edmonton and Winnipeg. International displays of his drawings include Florence, Italy and Kyiv, Ukraine. A second solo exhibition of his work is scheduled for 2006 at the Museum of Cultural Heritage in Kyiv, Ukraine.