Translated material
Knitted memory
“Housework” by Leonid Tishkov in the Krokin Gallery
Sculptures and objects made of fabric, photographs and videos in memory of the artist’s mother are presented at Leonid Tishkov’s exhibition “Domestic Labor” in the Krokin Gallery.This exhibition-memory was sublimated from memories and pain of loss.
In the film we see an empty apartment and orphaned things: simple utensils, old glasses, a simple mirror, scatterings of buttons, a modest wardrobe of a teacher. The son, just as his mother used to do, cuts her clothes into ribbons, “tears them into shags,” rolls them into balls and wraps them as souvenirs. The glomerulus, this symbol of fate, holds together the artifacts of memories that disturb the memory and scratch it until it bleeds. Glasses and a mirror, a spoon and a knife, a watch and a key, a cutting board and a silent telephone receiver, everything is connected by the thread of fate. Everything in this exhibition comes from skeins. Balls of unwound thread that hang on the wall or swirl around the ceiling may turn out to be not just skeins, but sky divers. “Their hoses go into the sky, their ropes are lost in eternity.”
With an artist like Leonid Tishkov, you don’t always know what you’re dealing with. To guess, you need to know a little about his mythology, this story with a continuation, which the artist has been telling for many years.
In his world live metaphysical creatures, the fruits of our consciousness and subconscious. The artist calls them “creatures of my being.” Among them there are divers, dabloids, and stomaks living in the trunk. They cannot be found in everyday life. According to the artist, they are absurd creatures. He comes up with stories about them, writes books, and, of course, he draws them, embodies them in sculptures, essentially telling them about himself and about you and me. Divers, for example, hide under their shell-suit (well, just like you and me) a subtle soul and dark thoughts, vanity and nobility, altruism and selfishness. The oldest in his collection of creatures are the Dabloids. They are ideal creatures, generated by consciousness: ours complexes, delusions, illusions, in general, everything that we accumulate throughout our lives. Everyone has their own personal Dabloid. He is always with you, so dear, with an interior red color, attached to your heart and sprouted like an umbilical cord, just like a child. Dabloids, by the way, like children, there can be more than one, you just have to want to create them. There is a knitted sculpture at the exhibition: a placenta rug, probably woven by the artist’s mother.
Connected to the child's place by an umbilical cord is someone who looks like an embryo or... like a dabloid of loss.
You, too, can realize and materialize your Dabloid by creating it, say, from a single sock, preferably red. The artist had already prepared the instructions a long time ago. You need to cut the toes at the toe, sew them around the edges, stuff them with rags, and make it look like a big foot with an appendage. And endow this creature with your disappointment, inertia, empty dreams. And then, when everyone deals with their Dabloids, the alienation and hostility between people will disappear. Such is the mythology.
Memorials are different. Someone erects a monument, someone hangs a framed photograph on the wall, or wears a watch of a loved one on their hand, or keeps notebooks, or simply cherishes an image in their memory. And the artist Leonid Tishkov captured memory through simple homework reviving memories.