Text: Brecht Wright Gander
Virkeligt Uvirkeligt features molten-seeming coagulations of glass, rich in colors which glide and fade and sizzle from lichen green to claret to beige, caught amid a contorted flux of becoming. They hang suspended on ropes, they lay, paralyzed mid-writhe, on steel planes, and they are pinioned by metal lances amid industrial scaffolding. The two main exhibition spaces are lit in contrast: one brightly illuminated, the other enshadowed and dim. This countering echoes across formal and conceptual layers: across the lush dynamism of the glass set against machined metal fixtures, and within the glasswork itself, which is coiled and fractured and iridized–every characteristic seemingly flux–and yet also frozen, silent, and still. One has time, at one’s leisure, to circle the works and take in the almost stupefying depth of detail and phenomenological effect, to observe the way that intermediary layers and treatments play against each other from different angles.
In Virkeligt Uvirkeligt, Koshenkova’s glassworks serve as the germinal seeds of an altered world. At times, they call to mind bacterial blooms, spectral splotches at the edge of industrial vents. At other times, they seem to be ectoplasmic distillations of energy. Just as the word ineffable is a contradiction–expressing exactly that which it claims to be inexpressible, Koshenkova’s self-negating title (Virkeligt Uvirkeligt translates to “Really Unreal”) contains a logical tension: all conceivable unrealities exist within the reality of the conceivable. All fictions are, in this sense, real. The otherworld arising in Marina Gisich Gallery is also a refraction of the urban environment around Koshenkova’s Denmark studio. The industrial scaffolding that defines the exhibition space includes elements recognizable to any urban dweller. The outside has come in. And the glassworks, foundered in the furnace of the artist’s interiority, have come out.
