q+a: ester petukhova

Tchotchke Gallery: Can you walk us through your process of finding and selecting the images that you incorporate into your paintings? Are your subjects strangers or personal connections?

Ester Petukhova: The process of image selection is a bit archaeological for me, as I try to search for estranged images or for an “outlandish quality” within an image. I like to collect things in person or virtually throughout the day: printed matter, ephemera, photographic images, labels, packaging, images hidden within online forums, video, film— the list is large. On the other hand, this frequently requires me to go down sketchy rabbit holes where there is no guarantee that their authors or subjects will be registered.

It's important to be democratic with selection because images, especially those sourced online or from another era entirely, have the tendency to erode over time. There is inevitably a distance between me and the livelihoods associated with the chosen images, but I try to work with images where that distance doesn’t feel impossible to grasp or place within my own world.

As of recently, I’ve been really interested in looking at pictorial diagrams or encyclopedic textbooks. Something about signage as a mechanism or the logic used to organize information on a page is really fascinating to me. In most cases, the images I source mirror a lived experience or person I know.

TG: Is there significance behind your inclusion of people you have a relationship with, or not, in your works?

EP: I think it depends on the situation. So many of the found images and people included within my paintings are symptomatic or miraged by a post-soviet upbringing. Therefore, there is a distinguishable visual language that will reach such an audience. When we look at the operation of pictorial advertising in the United States, Iran, or really any country for that matter— there is a formula for visual blocking that is generally consistent across any national identity.

So in some ways,  I think the figures I include become malleable to the environments they are transplanted into, whether they be real and personal—or manufactured altogether.

At the moment, I find it really difficult to translate my own body into the pictorial plane so I’ve been mostly painting others in my life. It's special to encounter a “character” or person in a foreign image and be able to place them as a kind of stand-in for someone you know presently. Like in the Militant Mink painting, the woman to the left with the heavy make-up and annoyed frog-like pout is someone we all dread or have maybe encountered at some point, you know? — So I really try to really lean into that quality.

TG: When did you first begin exploring different canvas shapes? What first inspired this and what is your process?

EP: Breaking free from the rectilinear frame has probably been one of the best things to happen to me! The conversation for painting just felt so limiting if a painting could only begin or end at the edge of a canvas. I wanted more from painting and communicating a mark. I was tired of my paintings competing against their edges so I decided to start cutting things out. In my first two years of undergrad, I became fascinated with the politics of edges when researching early constructivism in Russian Propaganda. I mean if the edges manufactured in art, design, and architecture were all manipulated to globally induce fear or strengthen a certain political ideology— I think there is a lot to unpack there.

A shaped surface has the potential to envelop a space. The painting forcefully interjects into our world leaving us to contend with the realized form of an image. The process of painting onto a pre-shaped canvas I think only intensifies the permanence of that image. There is an objective commitment.

TG: Heritage certainly plays an important role in your practice. How does your family react to the art you make? Are they in the periphery for you when you create?

EP: Their responses have been very supportive. It’s tough because I think there is an inherent resistance to embrace or deeply investigate some visuals—especially now more than ever. I think from an early age I had to come to terms with my Russian-ness and inability to extract myself from its history. Migration and relocation certainly play a role, but like most post-soviet migrants and refugees the understanding around nationality is rarely ever singular. It does feel startling in some ways because there is never one truth or narrative that collectively renders the condition of being “post-soviet”. This is evidenced by the fact that when I talk with my cousins from Ukraine, or my grandmother abroad in Russia, their responses to the paintings are so varied. My grandmother often laughs and mentions something along the lines of “what in the world made you paint that as a subject?”.

TG: How do your works generally evolve from start to finish? What does working intuitively mean to you? 

EP: My paintings are relatively set I would say. I have a solid idea of how each surface, color, or mark will be treated. I can “play” the progression of a painting in my mind from start to finish, much like a song. I almost never return to make alterations to a work. It's like underlining something in a book with a pen; it rings so true to you at that moment, but it's likely that after a few months when you revisit that same page you’ll feel different—But it’s not like you go and buy a whole other copy of that same book because you suddenly feel otherwise, right?

As silly as it sounds, it feels sacrilegious for me to go in and majorly change something after I’ve reached a finishing point— which is almost immediately evident to me. This is troublesome in some cases because I have a terrible habit of abandoning work if I come up with a better version of what I was initially trying to render. Life is simultaneously too long and devastatingly short for me to not just paint whatever comes to mind and consumes me entirely first.

TG: How do you know when a work is complete? What signals you that you are at your stopping point?

EP: The way I would describe this process is eerily close to what a production line might do. I look at all the sides, every corner, edge, mark, and sharpen up or sand away anything that might feel as though it is impeding my ability to register the painting as being complete. Once every possible edge and aspect of the painting has been treated, that’s when I know the work has reached a finishing point.

TG: What messages do you present in your paintings? What do you hope people receive from them?

EP: My message is finally about loss. Contending with loss. A loss of time, a loss of truth, humanitarian rights, freedom, personhood— nationhood. I think these are the ideas that reverberate most intensely throughout my paintings. I still have a lot of difficulties comprehending what my future will look like in regard to my Russian-ness. I can never return to Russia since fleeing in 2001, which circumstantially means also never being able to see or ever hold the grandmother I left behind over two decades ago. I don’t think this experience is singular in any way, as millions of refugees face this kind of severing each year. This is why I believe that time is imperative to understanding both the permanence and impermanence of our histories. There is a beautiful sentiment I often return to by Helen Molesworth, writing of Félix González-Torres‘s Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1987–90, “in which two store-bought clocks hang plainly, side by side,” Molesworth elaborates: “Synchronized at the time of their installation, they slowly, inevitably grow out of step with each other. . . . Now, more than two decades later . . . these two clocks, ticking ever so slightly in and out of rhythm with one another, offer a model of history and subjectivity. . . . there is never one story, one account, one sense of time that prevails. There is always more than one. The game—of history, of politics, of art, of love—is to figure out how to let the clocks strike differently without losing time.”