Show New Tech Girls by Olga Feshina; curator - Megan Green; New Tech Girls / VR Friends;
Google New York, New York, US, January 18 - April 30, 2019
These artworks by Olga Feshina are part of an ongoing series New Tech Girls. Feshina investigates contemporary girls who are obsessed with tech gadgets and explores their gestures and poses in relation to these objects. These girls talk on their speakerphones, take selfies, and watch VR movies. The baby deer depicted in the works symbolizes the inner child in all of us who is mesmerized by the perfection of the virtual world. The other animals depicted - dogs, cats and birds - serve as the girls' companions and appear to be part of the reality. They also represent the imminent future, in which VR headsets will turn into ubiquitous gadgets. In the future, dogs may have their own headsets instead of collars!
Feshina says: ''The headset is the symbol of the present. I saw it for the first time more than ten years ago. At that time, this was an odd thing with visual effects. Now it can show us the whole universe. There used to be something between us and the film screen, meters of air separating us. When putting on the headset, we sink down into a new reality which is right at the tip of your nose and allows us to perceive new experiences. 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''.
Counter to computer processing and realism, Feshina stylizes the bodies and generalizes facial traits accentuating wide smiles and entranced eyes. There is nothing digital in her works other than the topic itself. These works are informed by digital illustrations and classic cartoons.
She was born in Kazakhstan, lived in Moscow and is now based in New York. Feshina started her career 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. Feshina has been published in W magazine. At the Moscow Museum of Architecture in 2000 she displayed a collection of sport clothes, and staged an event where women performed with laptops and temporary vinyl tattoos with Internet addresses on their bodies. She also participated in Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Russia with her romantic performance “Yoga Fashion” in 2011. Show New Tech Girls of painting series by Olga Feshina is exposed at Google New York in 2019.
Series New Tech Girls, about New Tech Girls, curator Megan Green
