NOVEMBER 17 – 25, 2018 / ARTIST RESIDENCY STUDIO (CRW, ENTRANCE 5)
Lyokha G. is a Vladivostok-based musician and artist working with found objects, assemblages, lo-fi computer graphics and drawing from life, capturing the idiocy of everyday life. Incidentally, the word “artist” doesn’t quite apply to him. He prefers to call himself either a podelochnik (“craftsman”) or a poddelochnik (a counterfeiter), a play on words that effectively removes him from any possible integration into the dominant system of contemporary art.
Indeed, “crafts” or “fakes” make up one of his most significant series, which consists of assemblages of discarded toys, each accompanied by a caption and brought together into small compositions, suggesting absurd narratives. Lyokha G. also actively works with the “Caesar and Tripod Studio”, regularly publishing updates on his community page in VKontakte. Among the studio’s works one can find simplified and deliberately “bad” graphic design, mocking the markers and clichés pumped through advertising, the widespread adherence to Anglicism, and more generally the excessive pathos surrounding goods, services and “creative labor.”