NEWYORKART - OLGA FESHINA: NEW TECH GIRLS—BIKINI ISSUE

NEWYORKART.COM 06.22.19

Olga Feshina: New Tech Girls—Bikini Issue

by NYA Gallery Press June 22, 2019

Opening Reception: Wednesday, July 10, 6-9pm 

Exhibition Dates: July 4 - July 26, 2019 

7 Franklin Place, New York, NY 10013

NYA Gallery and Gallery 104 are pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Olga Feshina. Curated by Shane Townley, the show will feature a total of thirteen paintings, many of which have not been previously exhibited. These works explore core motifs related to the artist’s ongoing “New Tech Girls” series, namely beauty, image construction and distortion, identity, self-fashioning, and presentation. With these new paintings of scantily clad young girls posing with handheld devices, Feshina calls the viewer’s attention to the contrast between contemporary and historic portraiture poses. She highlights how restrictive codes of behavior change, migrate, and ultimately manifest themselves in visual culture.

“New Tech Girls” Series

Feshina began the “New Tech Girls” series in 2016 and has continued elaborating on this body of work over the past few years. She is fascinated with how technological progress has had an adverse impact on the psychological development of women today. Specifically, she offers a compelling critique of how the paradigms of contemporary feminine beauty are created, distributed, and absorbed across digital devices and platforms. Using a soft, muted palette and matte texture, she situates her flat figures within shallow pictorial spaces. Her work repeatedly calls attention to the idea of surface, which is apt since her imagery is focused on the complicated dichotomy between reality and the virtual world. Across canvases like Girls Taking Selfie on the Beach (2016) and Girls Taking Selfie in the Fitting Room (2016), Feshina arranges highly idealized young girls in emulative poses that mirror ones they’ve seen via social media. Their actions in turn perpetuate trending postures in a never-ending cycle of vapid mimicry. The artist mines numerous media outlets in order to become familiar with the most common gestures, poses, and stances in circulation. What is more, her characters are often in synchronized postures in the compositions, underscoring the loss of individual expression and identity due to the nearly ubiquitous forces of conformity that operate underneath the surface of every constructed image on social media. Interestingly, in Girls Taking Selfie on the Beach, one of the figures holds a selfie stick, framing the overall painting as the screen of an iPhone. In other works, such as Girls with Friends Walking in Park (2019) and Girls Watching the Same Movie on the Beach (2017), the slim, youthful figures are together physically, but removed or distanced psychologically because they’re engaged in entirely different realms virtually. The artist has described her female figures as twenty-first century versions of the nymphs of antiquity. In Greek mythology, nymphs presided over certain natural locales, such as mountains, forests, lakes, rivers, and oceans. Feshina’s technologically obsessed nymphs similarly inhabit outdoor environs, but are often completely disconnected from these physical surroundings, inhabiting a digital forest so to speak, one populated with computer-coded creatures. The artist’s insertion of a doe in many of these works further expands this idea of a digital forest or enchanted grove. As Feshina has explained, animals figure rather prominently in fairy tales— folkloric or literary forms that have a lasting impact on children’s conception of self and others. Within her series, she understands the doe as representing each figure’s inner child: innocent, naive, impressionable, and needing protection. In the diptych Girls Exploring Their Feminine Nature (2017) and Inner Child Watching VR (2018), the doe is seen as being corrupted by early exposure to technology. Overall, these paintings can be read as a social commentary on how technology has facilitated the rapid construction and dissemination of implied codes of behavior about how girls should look and act.

The exhibition will open to the public on Thursday, July 4th with a reception taking place the following week on Wednesday, July 10th from 6-9pm. The show will remain on view through Friday, July 26th. Visitors may see works during regular gallery hours: Monday through Sunday, 12-5pm. For more information, please call or email press@newyorkart.com.

Artist Bio

Olga Feshina grew up in Kazakhstan, where she trained as a fashion and costume designer. She attended Karaganda Art School and focused on painting and photography. Later, she studied contemporary costume design at Kazakh National Academy of Arts. Among her many design accolades, she created the world’s first sporting uniform for chess—a commission from the International Chess Federation (FIDE). Her training as a designer has heavily influenced her painting style, which includes formal elements of cartoons and digital illustrations. In 2013, the interdisciplinary creative practitioner moved to New York. 

Feshina has been featured in a number of notable publications, such as W Magazine, Esquire, FAD Magazine, Women Love Tech, Wallpaper, ELLE, and L'Officiel. She has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Tvorchestvo (Moscow); the Shchusev Museum of Architecture (Moscow); Paris sur Mode (Paris); and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Russia. Most recently, she exhibited works from “New Tech Girls” at Google’s offices in New York and at a booth for NYAFAIR in Tribeca.

ARTGALLERYAMERICA MAGAZINE - OLGA FESHINA: GOOGLE NEW YORK EXHIBIT

ARTGALLERYAMERICA.ART AUG 2019

ArtGalleryAmerica

Olga Feshina: Google New York Exhibit

By Angelo Acosta

Since the third week of January 2019, artist Olga Feshina has exhibited her work at Google's offices in New York. She also had a solo show at a booth by NYA Gallery at NYAFAIR Tribeca, New York. She is now preparing to show a new body of work, “New Tech Girls—Bikini Issue,” at NYA Gallery in July 2019. Originally from Kazakhstan, Feshina now lives in Upper Manhattan in New York. Feshina took time to discuss different aspects of being an artist with ArtGalleryAmerica and to talk about the Exhibit New Tech Girls - VR Friends curated by Megan Green at Google New York.

ArtGalleryAmerica: What does art mean to you? 

Feshina: First of all, art for me, it’s what I can bring in this life from my sense of perception of that reality, knowledge, feelings, and what I want to say or emphasize. The second layer of it for me is a way or language of many centuries of human history that I can use, read and translate. You can not read art without knowing its history or without learning how it developed or without studying patterns of every step of that progress. Despite today’s situation when contemporary art includes an unbelievable variety of methods and ways of self- expression as well as the embodiment of ideas in our reality, the initial principles of the fine arts are closer to me when the work glorifies the spirit and structures the consciousness. I am also interested in dramatic streams of human consciousness in the form of gigantic sculptures, ambitious art events, or light streams, telling about life and emotions. Ephemeral expressions of emotions carry no obligation except the pleasure of perception. I determine the difference between craft and art. Craft is a skill, whereas art is a skill plus spirit and intelligence for me. In contemporary art, the spirit is replaced by feelings and emotions or earthly transformations of the spirit.

ArtGalleryAmerica: When did you know that art was going to be your life?

Feshina: When I understood that I have something that mesmerized and amused people, which wasn't only my wish, but also a power. I am an artist-this is what I used to know from my very childhood, and that's what I'd like to do all my life. People in my family were excited about my skills to depict people or objects, although I was quite young- about three years old. I didn't have to think over my future occupation-fine art was quite obvious. In my youth, I was strongly driven by fashion design. Because of this, I couldn't take up art more seriously than I'd want.

ArtGalleryAmerica: How does your work comment on current social issues?

Feshina: Most of us love technology, especially new gadgets. We have mobile phones and Internet. We can see new poses, gestures, and hand positions never used before. I investigate that situation through contemporary girls obsessed with tech gadgets. They express their external and inner world by means of gadgets and technological innovations. These girls implement technologies in everyday life: they chat on the speaker phone, take selfies, launch drones, make films and blogs, use VR and AR technologies– all these became common things for them. They synchronize poses and gestures acting in unison. By posting their copies online, they are exploring life and self through technology. Nevertheless, they are the same nymphs from classical portraits and genre compositions in their new personification. They are the ones who started the selfie revolution in social net. They are so deeply involved in connection through tech gadgets, that they even explore their feminine self via virtual reality. I depicted the inner child of new tech girls as a baby deer with a VR headset. This unprotected creation, which symbolizes clean and cute beauty like a girl’s soul, is stunned with admiration and mesmerized with the perfection of virtual worlds. When putting on the headset, we sink down into a new reality which is right at the tip of our nose, and it captures us with new experiences more intensely in the outer world. In parallels of a meditative state, the deeper you get into your inner world, the more harmony you discover, which is reflected in the outside world. I am not able to change the world, but I can find parallel perceptions of reality.

ArtGalleryAmerica: Do you have a personal philosophy about art's place in society? 

Feshina: Art and events connected with it reflect the social state of affairs in society. It can look like a dim or distorted mirror or a pile of pieces. It's great if this mirror is an ideal plain surface in the foreground of a vast room of a society.

ArtGalleryAmerica: Do you critique your own work?

Feshina: I'd say I analyze it. I also try to watch how viewers perceive it. While doing it, I can see all my merits and demerits. However, life’s reality gives us situations where we often should compromise with the imperfections for further evolution. I adore perfection, but I choose small distortions or mistakes for living. For me, design should be perfect, but art can be full of mistakes.

ArtGalleryAmerica: What is a “real” artist?

Feshina: Before now I used to think that a real artist is bound to dedicate his life to the arts, even if there are chances or circumstance for realizing his ideas in life. While keeping to this conception, I admitted that an artist can be both highly emotional or a 'lost life', who unconsciously throws out a stream of creative energy now and then. Now I think a real artist is a creator who is consciously able to submit his will to become strongly disciplined to reach the goal of changing his reality via art and achieve realization.

ArtGalleryAmerica: What is your creative process like? 

Feshina: I am fascinated with new technologies and gadgets, but I don’t use computer processing for my paintings of New Tech Girls series. I use my own technique of local fills of colors and tones like in digital illustrations or classic cartoons. However, there is nothing digital in my works, other than a digital topic. Everything is hand-drawn and hand-painted from a sketch to the last brushstroke. I wanted it to look like I imitate a computer, but I dispute against the computer processing of images in this series. By this, I emphasize the difference between habitual reality and the virtual one.

ArtGalleryAmerica: Do you always like the end result of your creative process?

Feshina: Some works I like, some I don't. If I feel it's enough, I stop any attempts of improving it. I rely on my inward intuition which is my censor. If I don't like the result, I simply put the canvas aside and start a new one. Some time later I come back to an unfinished one, and sometimes I realize that I went too far from it.

ArtGalleryAmerica: Can you see your finished art before you start it?

Feshina: Sometimes I see my new artwork in detail and just materialize it but sometimes I just feel like working and seeing what will happen. I love both processes, drawing a lot of sketches on paper or throwing the contour right on the canvas.

ArtGalleryAmerica: How is your work different from other artists in your genre?

Feshina: By making art, I express my attitude through the forms and colors with my pattern. I learned static poses from old icons and a genre of figurative compositions. I stylize the bodies with new poses and gestures in relation to tech gadgets. I generalize traits of face, accentuating on a wide frozen smile and entranced eyes. The girls I depicted in the paintings are practically the size of viewers to make the distance between them and us closer. Also, I use pastel colors. Imagine our light future which has already come. As I said before, I don’t use computer processing for my artworks.

ArtGalleryAmerica: How did the exhibit at Google come about?

Feshina: On August 2018, I visited one exhibition of curator Megan Green, when I was looking for a gallery or space for my first New Tech Girls show. I contacted Megan and sent her my ready works of New Tech Girls series and information about me. A few days later I received a letter from her with a proposal to meet at Google New York in Chelsea and see the space for the exhibition. It was the perfect place for me-the one I dreamed about. Google was the first one on my list that I considered for the first exhibition for my tech topic.

CREATIVE BOOM - WHAT DOES OUR RELIANCE ON TECH MEAN FOR HOW WE VIEW THE FEMALE BODY?

CREATIVEBOOM.COM 06.27.19

What does our reliance on tech mean for how we view the female body?

Written by: Emily Gosling

27 JUNE 2019

Olga Feshina's New Tech Girls are both charming, calming and strange: posing with preened, practised Insta-ready perfection but somehow also vacant and vapid.

The poses and compositions (often seeing subjects taking selfies or talking on speakerphone) are all based on those from classical portraiture; juxtaposing the woman as “her own” subject today compared to that which was seen through the artists’ gazes in years gone by. 

According to the artist, what’s interesting about such figures is that they embody a very modern, tech-based reality but also a classical view of the body that’s been largely unchanged for centuries. 

Where Feshina portrays women in groups, she says they “tend to be constantly together as they strive to exchange information and then to share their senses of perception with the whole world. To get better harmony and mutual understanding the new girls subconsciously synchronise their poses, acting in unison either watching a movie, listening to music, taking a selfie, looking for smoothie recipes, getting parcels by drone, exploring the underwater world, virtual reality and their feminine nature with new tech gadgets.”

The artist’s approach to drawing the body is highly stylised, honing in on simple representations of facial features—or as she puts it, “ wide frozen smile and eyes.” 

And while the pieces examine digital culture, they are created entirely using analogue processes using acrylic on canvases that are almost the exact size of the viewer. 

The aim of the pieces, according to the artists, is to make us think more (or indeed at all) about how the female body, often just through disembodied, distally-framed parts, become part of a wider consciousness. What does this mean for what we think of as “women”, as “feminine”? 

Her use of deer within her images (sometimes these sport VR headsets) hints at the idea of the corruption of nature, perhaps, and evokes ideas of fairytales, too. For the artist, though, the baby deer also represents the “inner child”—one “ mesmerised with the perfection of the tech, digital and virtual world.”

NEWYORKART - ARTIST FEATURE: OLGA FESHINA

NEWYORKART.COM 05.19.19

Artist Feature: Olga Feshina

NYA Gallery Press May 15, 2019

Written by Anthony Huffman

“New Tech Girls” Series

Feshina began the “New Tech Girls” series in 2016 and has continued elaborating on this body of work over the past few years. She is fascinated with how technological progress has had an adverse impact on the nature and psychological development of women today. Specifically, she offers a compelling critique of how the paradigms of contemporary feminine beauty are created, distributed, and absorbed across digital devices and platforms. The artist uses a soft, muted palette to render flat figures that have a smooth, matte surface and are situated within shallow pictorial spaces. Her work repeatedly calls attention to the idea of surface, which is appropriate as her imagery is focused on the complicated dichotomy between the virtual world and reality.

Across canvases like Girls Taking Selfie on the Beach (2016) and Girls Taking Selfie in the Fitting Room (2016), Feshina positions highly idealized young women mimicking poses they’ve seen via social media; their actions in turn continue to perpetuate these postures in a never-ending cycle of vapid mimicry. The artist mines numerous media outlets in order to become familiar with the most common gestures, poses, and stances in circulation. What is more, her characters are often in synchronized postures, underscoring the loss of individual expression and identity due to the nearly ubiquitous forces of conformity that operate underneath the surface of every image on social media. Interestingly, in Girls Taking Selfie on the Beach, one of the girls holds a selfie stick, framing the overall painting as the screen of an iPhone. In other works, such as Girls with Friends Walking in Park (2019) and Girls Watching the Same Movie on the Beach (2017), the young, slim figures are together physically, but removed or distanced psychologically because they’re engaged in entirely different virtual realms.

The artist has described her female figures as twenty-first century versions of the nymphs of antiquity. In Greek mythology, nymphs presided over certain natural locales, such as oceans, mountains, lakes, rivers, and forests. Feshina’s technologically inclined nymphs similarly inhabit outfoor environs, but are often completely disconnected from these physical surroundings, inhabiting a digital forest instead, one populated computer-coded creatures. The artist’s insertion of a doe in many of these works further expands this idea of a digital forest or enchanted grove. As Feshina has explained, animals figure rather prominently in fairy tales—folkloric or literary forms that have a lasting impact on children’s conception of self and others. Within her artistic practice, she understands this animal as representing each figure’s inner child: innocent, naive, impressionable, and needing protection. In the diptych Girls Exploring Their Feminine Nature (2017) and Inner Child Watching VR (2018), the doe is seen as being corrupted by exposure to technology.

Overall, these paintings are a social commentary on how technology has facilitated the rapid construction and dissemination of implied codes of behavior about how girls should look and act. Her work touches on concepts of beauty, image construction and distortion, identity, self-fashioning, and presentation. 

Artist Bio

Olga Feshina grew up in Kazakhstan, where she trained as a fashion and costume designer. She was enrolled at Karaganda Art School and focused on painting and photography. Later, she studied contemporary costume design at Kazakh National Academy of Arts. One of her many accolades includes designing the world’s first sporting uniform for chess—a commission from the International Chess Federation (FIDE). Her training as a designer has heavily influenced her painting style, which includes formal aspects of cartoons and digital illustrations. In 2013, the interdisciplinary creative practitioner moved to New York.

Feshina has been featured in a number of notable publications, such as W Magazine, Esquire, FAD Magazine, Women Love Tech, Wallpaper, ELLE, and Bazaar. She has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Tvorchestvo (Moscow); the Shchusev Museum of Architecture (Moscow); Paris sur Mode (Paris); and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Russia. Most recently, she exhibited works from her ongoing series “New Tech Girls” at Google’s offices in New York and at a booth for NYAFAIR in Tribeca. In July 2019, NYA Gallery will present a new body of work by the artist: “New Tech Girls—Bikini Issue.” There will be an opening reception for the public on Wednesday, July 10th, 6-9pm. The show will be on view from July 4th through July 26th.  

FAD MAGAZINE - NEW YORK BASED ARTIST OLGA FESHINA TALKS TO US ABOUT ‘NEW TECH GIRLS’

03.18.2019

FAD-MAGAZINE.COM

NEW YORK BASED ARTIST OLGA FESHINA TALKS TO US ABOUT ‘NEW TECH GIRLS’

By Mark Westall • 18 March 2019

We caught up with New York-based artist Olga Feshina to talk about her art practice and her ongoing series ‘New Tech Girls’ which is being exhibited at Google New York.

Why are you an artist?
I believe that with my art I can transfer to the other reality, where I can see answers from the Game. I investigate a contemporary situation where girls like most of us are obsessed with tech gadgets. I explore their new gestures and poses in relation to these objects. By making art, I express my attitude through the forms and colours with my pattern. I am not able to change the World, but I can find other parallel perceptions of reality.

2. Can you tell us more about your work and what are the main ideas you would like to express? 
In my ongoing series ‘New Tech Girls’, I strive to portray contemporary women who look to understand their inner and external world by means of gadgets and technological innovations. These girls chatting on the speakerphone, launching drones, making films and blogs, using VR and AR technologies, exploring their feminine gist are the ones who have created the selfie revolution. However, they are the same nymphs from classical portraits and genre compositions but with a new personification with new gestures and poses. I depict the inner child of the new tech girl as a baby deer with VR headsets, which is mesmerised and stunned in admiration of the perfection of the virtual world.

How do you start the process of making work?
I am fascinated with new technologies and gadgets, but don’t use new technology for my paintings. Sometimes I draw a lot of sketches on paper, but sometimes I just throw the contour right on the canvas. I stylise the bodies and generalise facial traits focusing on wide smiles and entranced eyes. Everything is analog: hand-drawn and hand-painted from a sketch to the last brushstroke. By this, I emphasize the difference between analog reality and the virtual one.

Name 3 artists that have inspired your work.
I am inspired by the portraits of the Renaissance and icon paintings of the past centuries. I admire the classical principles of static and frozen postures and gestures. The artworks of Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, Walter Disney, David Hockney, Alex Katz make me happy.

Can you explain ‘contemporary tech reality’?
Contemporary tech reality is a convenient instrument that helps us to connect with our inner and external world. VR headset seem to be the symbol of the tech present. I saw it for the first time more than ten years ago, and it was an odd thing with visual effects. Now it can show us the whole universe.

Nevertheless, using a lot of tech can sometimes make us afraid to lose our ability to perceive and understand reality. In the past, the virtual reality existed only in the movies or the TV screens and there used to be a distance between it and us. We would stay in the comfort zone as if watching the events from outside. Now when we put on the headset, we sink down into a new reality, which is right on the tip of your nose. It parallels a meditative state – the deeper you get into your inner world, the more harmony you discover, which is reflected in the outside world.

6. When do you feel Real?
When I make art with high vibrations, I feel real. Frankly, any creation with consciousness gives me a feeling of reality, either drawing in VR or painting on canvas.

7. If people want to see your work where should they go? 
You can catch my exhibition New Tech Girls at Google New York curated by collector and curator Megan Green. It brings me great joy that thousands of people who work within the tech world can see my work.

About the artist
Olga Feshina was primarily known as a fashion designer who created the first chess sport uniform in the World for the International Chess Federation FIDE which was presented in Cannes, France, in 2001.
She has always been interested in the progress of technology on the contemporary woman. In 2000 at Moscow Museum of Architecture during a performance, ‘She offered an egg as the symbol of the Internet where women appeared holding Apple iBooks sporting vinyl tattoos with Internet addresses. In 2011 she exhibited at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Moscow with a romantic Yoga Fashion performance. She was born in Kazakhstan, lived in Moscow and is now based in New York.

WOMEN LOVE TECH - NEW TECH GIRLS ARE MESMERISED WITH THE PERFECTION OF VIRTUAL WORLD

WOMENLOVETECH.COM 02.18.2019

New Tech Girls Are Mesmerised With The Perfection Of Virtual World 

Women Love Tech on February 28, 2019

I am Olga Feshina an artist and designer. I am deeply fascinated by the perfection of technological progress. Gadgets, gradually becoming an integral part of our life, attract my biggest attention and this is what my art works reflect.

I was literary captivated by the tech world many years ago. We all keep remembering electronic translators, or the first Internet browsing or super stylish Apple iBook..

Moscow In 2000

I was so delighted by all this that I expressed it in my show of a collection of sport clothes, named “the Internet” performed in the Moscow Museum of Architecture in 2000.

There, models came out with Apple iBooks and had temporary vinyl tattoos with the internet addresses on their bodies. They also wore helmets, which I imagined, in the future would become an integral accessory with built-in smart sensors and telephones.

In ongoing series of artworks New Tech Girls I depict contemporary women who apprehend their inner and external world by means of gadgets and technological innovations. These girls implement technologies in everyday things: they chat on the speaker phone, launch drones, make films and blogs, use VR and AR technologies, explore their feminine gist – all these became common things for them. However they are the same nymphs from classical portraits and genre compositions in its new personification in the new poses with gestures, and they are the ones who have done selfie revolution in social net. I depicted the inner child of “New Tech Girls “ as a baby deer with VR headsets, which is mesmerised in stunned in admiration with the perfection of virtual world.

New Tech Girls’ Exhibit at Google in NY

The topic of my show New Tech Girls at Google in New York, curated by Megan Green, represent an interaction of people and animals with VR technologies. The other animals depicted at this exhibition – dogs, cats and birds – serve as the girls’ companions and appear to be part of the reality. They also depict the imminent future, in which VR headsets will turn into ubiquitous gadgets. In the future, dogs may have their own headsets instead of collars.

Subjects of some works are taken from my personal experience. I often listen to music with application SoundCloud. The interface of this program became the symbol of music source, so in my painting the girls on the rooftop are listening to music on SoundCloud. I often look for recipes on YouTube and like to watch comedy channels. In my other work, the bloggers use the phone to publish a smoothie recipe on YouTube. Naturally, the most familiar subject of my paintings are girls taking selfie for Instagram, which I use as the source of information for my visual research.

In my artworks I don’t use digital technologies. Everything is hand-drown and hand-painted from a sketch to the last brushstroke. By this I emphasise the difference between habitual reality and virtual one.