140: Artists in Love – A Digital Exhibition by Masha Ryskin & Serge Marchetta

My work is about a sense of place and belonging and the search for that sense of place through fragments of experience and memory coming together as an integrated whole.

I came from the Soviet Union where I had a very classical background of painting, learning from the plaster casts and painting from life and painting a lot of genre paintings.

But what I realized as I went on is that what I'm really interested in is fragments coming together and not only the pictorial way of presenting a landscape or an environment, but really the search for one.

So in my work I take bits and pieces of my surroundings and assemble them into imaginary environments.

Some of my work is pretty small, as you see, and some of my work is quite a bit larger.

The work is about relationships between disparate pieces and elements and pathways that tie them all together.

So I want people to get lost in the work and find their way through.

The work is very intuitive and it undergoes many iterations and includes collage as well as many layers.

It is also an exploration of mark making, and I'm really interested in the way one mark, an accumulation of that mark, can really construct an environment.

Some of the work becomes almost sculptural, so the person can really experience being in that landscape almost in real life.

and so it functions both as an installation but also as different fragments that the viewer can navigate.

I love working on room-sized drawing installations where I can combine collage and physically move through the room while making the work and that way the viewer can experience something similar so the viewer can really make it an immersive experience.

Surface plays a very big role in my work.

So when I work with printmaking, I deliberately choose paper that is very imperfect and sometimes distress it further, which brings depth and a sense of time to the work and alludes to layers of memories and history.

You can see this in the detail of one of the previous pieces.

The works are one of a kind.

I print with a matrix and then I add drawing and also monotype.

I also had an opportunity to work with porcelain.

These are drawings on thin slabs.

It was a totally new experience for me to watch the work change as it comes out from the kiln, and it's something that I would love to explore further.

These are quite small, ranging from 5 to 11 inches in height, and they are sometimes displaying by themselves and sometimes they are displayed in a row on a little shelf.

The idea of meandering and finding one's way fits the accordion book format really well, where one can walk and draw the impressions of a place and then the piece can be constantly reconfigured.

This idea of reconfiguring and fleeting impressions has been a thread in all my works and I continue to bring it into our collaborations as well.

My work is about a sense of place and belonging and the search for that sense of place through fragments of experience and memory coming together as an integrated whole.

I came from the Soviet Union where I had a very classical background of painting, learning from the plaster casts and painting from life and painting a lot of genre paintings.

But what I realized as I went on is that what I'm really interested in is fragments coming together and not only the pictorial way of presenting a landscape or an environment, but really the search for one.

So in my work I take bits and pieces of my surroundings and assemble them into imaginary environments.

Some of my work is pretty small, as you see, and some of my work is quite a bit larger.

The work is about relationships between disparate pieces and elements and pathways that tie them all together.

So I want people to get lost in the work and find their way through.

The work is very intuitive and it undergoes many iterations and includes collage as well as many layers.

It is also an exploration of mark making, and I'm really interested in the way one mark, an accumulation of that mark, can really construct an environment.

Some of the work becomes almost sculptural, so the person can really experience being in that landscape almost in real life.

and so it functions both as an installation but also as different fragments that the viewer can navigate.

I love working on room-sized drawing installations where I can combine collage and physically move through the room while making the work and that way the viewer can experience something similar so the viewer can really make it an immersive experience.

Surface plays a very big role in my work.

So when I work with printmaking, I deliberately choose paper that is very imperfect and sometimes distress it further, which brings depth and a sense of time to the work and alludes to layers of memories and history.

You can see this in the detail of one of the previous pieces.

The works are one of a kind.

I print with a matrix and then I add drawing and also monotype.

I also had an opportunity to work with porcelain.

These are drawings on thin slabs.

It was a totally new experience for me to watch the work change as it comes out from the kiln, and it's something that I would love to explore further.

These are quite small, ranging from 5 to 11 inches in height, and they are sometimes displaying by themselves and sometimes they are displayed in a row on a little shelf.

The idea of meandering and finding one's way fits the accordion book format really well, where one can walk and draw the impressions of a place and then the piece can be constantly reconfigured.

This idea of reconfiguring and fleeting impressions has been a thread in all my works and I continue to bring it into our collaborations as well.