Many artists fancied remote, unknown countries. They would travel to the Orient in search of discovery and inspiration. For Masha Shubina, the Orient is not just an episode, it is integral to her life. This year she went to India for the third time where she spent over three months doing a series of paintings and graphics – the project known as “Masha´s Time”.
The environment in a foreign country demands much more attention. Perhaps, some fragments of the Indian reality keep breaking through into the new works by Shubina. The painting series “Masha´s Time” is composed of individual fragments scattered over the pristine canvases. Those are interconnected by the author´s personal associations. Some are easy to decode, in others, she offers the audience freedom to make their own interpretations. The artist invites us to come along and marvel over the eternal Indian miracles.
As for the characters she has painted, certainly, Masha is always there, but one can also see a sleeping Indian or a cat, an Indian cow or a pig aimlessly wandering around, a flock of crows on the ground or grazing goats. The van is passing, the fan is rotating, the fish is being fried in a banana leaf – the audience can watch the leisurely pace of a different lifestyle.
The artist communicates her Indian impressions in the second part of “Masha´s Time”. She shares her own observations and reflections about what life is like in India. The artist believes that “the real life is much more amazing than a fantasy. Why invent new realities where the reality invents us?”
The current popularity of the “people´s journalism” on the Internet inspires her to make own contribution in the heavy flow of the online prose. The new literature/ graphics project can be viewed as her first attempt at creation of her own blog. Today, it is written on the gallery walls, but tomorrow, all that will be available to any user of the world-wide web.
She presents each hand-written page of her personal diary/guide in a separate frame along with the graphical illustrations. Those are her new works where she uses the multilayer painting technique. One sheet is superimposed over the other one, and one of the pictures gets veiled, revealing first, second, and, sometimes, the third grounds. If you put together two similar portraits that show different poses, you would create a time difference of several minutes or hours between them. It is well known that time runs differently in the Orient. In that way, we can see several consecutive “frames” of the same event.
The glamorous Masha lives in the present – in “Masha´s Time”. She belongs to the young generation of the modern Ukrainian artists. They prefer conveying the immediate personal experience in the constantly changing environment. She is one of those who can easily catch the vibes of her time and who gets a chance to snatch demand in Kiev, Moscow, Berlin and other cities within a very short period of time.
Her success also results from self-advertising as a signature artistic concept. She uses one of the most common and ancient types of advertising, and chooses outrageous forms of self-advertising typical of show business. Today, Masha Shubina exists as both an artist and a media character that she made with her own hands.
Nataliya Filonenko.