Anton Ginzburg: Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives / Miruna Dragan: Another Name for Everywhere

Anton Ginzburg
Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives

Anton Ginzburg, a New York-based artist, presents a new body of work titled Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives. The exhibition explores the collapse of the modern universalist project. Visitors encounter a series of artistic investigations recalling Constructivist pedagogical experiments combined with the artist’s personal mythologies.

Throughout the 1920s, VKhUTEMAS (the Soviet equivalent of Bauhaus) reflected the school’s mandate to merge progressive politics and technical innovation within the universalist, modernist project. In a summer residency among the mountains of southern Alberta, Ginzburg engaged in visual exercises, including colour and spatial studies, photography, and graphic explorations, reanimating avant-garde methodology into a present day North American context. In a playful if destructive gesture, the artist burned spatial studies, summoning the aura of the interrupted avant-garde experiment. The deconstructive gesture is echoed in Ginzburg’s new film Turo—the third installment of his trilogy preceded by Hyperborea and Walking the Sea. In Turo, three modernist buildings are explored as stages for past utopias along with a recording of a “ghost mode” video game based in the ruins of Pripyat (site of Chernobyl catastrophe) and featuring Tatlin’s unrealized tower. The artist employs Esperanto—a language devised as an international medium of communication—to guide the viewer through each chapter of this “fictionalized non-fiction.”

Anton Ginzburg was born in 1974 in Leningrad, USSR, where he received a classical arts education before immigrating to the United States in 1990. Ginzburg earned a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 1997 and MFA degree from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts. His art has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and White Columns in New York, among others.

Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.

Miruna Dragan
Another Name for Everywhere

How do we relate to things that are unnamed or unnamable? What happens at the perceptual limits of human thought, consciousness, and comprehension? Throughout her practice, Miruna Dragan engages these questions, peeling back at the glimmering edges where language, object, and reason overlap with the unknown. With an ongoing interest in metaphysics, Dragan’s site-responsive work reflects themes of dispersion, immanence, and transcendence. Operating within and between various modes of studio research including drawing, lens-based media, site-specific intervention, and others, she interprets surreal geographies through the reanimation of archetypes, myths, and symbols.

Throughout her practice, Dragan excavates the liminal spaces between seemingly opposing conditions—everywhere is simultaneously all places, and no singular place; light and shadow create enveloping works that occupy space without physical mass or volume; anachronisms abound in pieces that elaborate on ancient and contemporary techniques and philosophies; and meaning is untethered from language—she bends these conditions in on themselves, creating a space for reconciliation between faith and reason.

Light enters the dark, seeping through impossible density, to find us here groping at the edges of comprehension. In Another Name for Everywhere, Miruna Dragan invites us to stand with her at this precipice, to encounter the unknown, and to leap freely without expectation.

Miruna Dragan is a Calgary-based artist, whose work has been exhibited in national and international venues, including Museo de la Ciudad in Queretaro, Mexico (2009, 2012), Khyber ICA in Halifax (2011), the Calgary Biennial (2012), the Esker Foundation (2013), and the Alberta Biennial (2013, 2017).

This exhibition is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and curated by Christina Cuthbertson. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.