Artist Statement
Anastasia Tailakova is a lens-based artist, born in Samara, Russia. Her early work contemplates the inner trials and insecurities that are an inherent part of today’s adolescent experience. The mythical act of “growing up” becomes ever-delayed in an absence of rite-of-passage rituals and trustable guidance. Young people in Tailakova’s pictures are caught in a silent standstill, where the most active decision making leads to nothing but confusion, and the means to overcome internal barriers are nowhere in sight.

More recently, her photographs have addressed questions of temporal placement and the abstract “found”. Using rare, nearly forgotten cameras to achieve a subtle feel of the very recent past, she makes images that look like recovered memory recordings and induce a strong sense of nostalgia. While being modern creations, these pictures appear fragmentary and taken out of their native sequence, which is likely located somewhere at the advent of digital technology. They seek to join the rows of anonymous visual artifacts that have long lost all links to their factual origins. The photographer’s calculated approach to working with aged tools tempts us to suspend our disbelief and discover something old in something new.

Anastasia Tailakova currently lives and works in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

 

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