Kuzma Vostrikov and Ajuan Song

of contemporary art, authorship, and technology and offers a newly subjective and visually intense view of the modern world. And so, while we search for reconciliation or closure in the story line, we may instead discover an alluring and enduring inscrutability.

In the Absolutely Augmented Reality series, carefully orchestrated mise-en-scène tableaux merge tropes from painting (including iconic imagery from Surrealism) with mysterious motifs, creating an unsettling, painterly collision of fantastic narrative and portraiture under the shadow of globalism.

In many of the pictures the artists have rearranged bodies, symbols, costumes, and imagery in a new and sometimes shocking manner, creating a new parallel world. There is a deliberate borrowing from popular culture, as well as from canonical modernist artists such as the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (for example, his scene of three men in bowler hats sitting facing the open sky by the seaside). Within this context, the artists play with the subversion of images to create a distinct visual language to construct strange worlds and strange inhabitants. A woman plunges through a red wall of clouds, only her bottom and legs remaining visible. One finds oneself immersed in pictorial puzzles at once disorienting and evocative of desire and wonderment.

And yet a distinguishing feature of Song’s and Vostrikov’s work is pictorial clarity reminiscent of classical portraiture in the way it surrounds the central subject with symbolic objects and environments.3 While the artists integrate models from Magritte, Surrealism, and Cubism as “part of the preserved past,” they also seek to create new imagery to “reveal something new for the critics and the audience.

When we talk about the analog form, we are talking about the past.

As if there is not a point anymore in dealing with outdated technologies, pressing records, developing film, buying brushes and canvases.”

Vostrikov and Song concentrate on the reexamination of mass media, the unrelenting ecosystem of social media and photography, wherein the pervasive world of images has become increasingly homogeneous.

In this view, subjectivity, creativity, and authorship are muted in an unrelenting process of erasure and silencing. The two artists extend their subject matter by exploring a set of themes at once interrelated and divergent. They situate their practice with juxtapositions of the familiar and unfamiliar, but it should also be noted that the stories unfolding in this work are unlike any other body of work and present an entirely new and riveting visual sensibility. As well, the oeuvre as a whole seems to oscillate between overtly symbolic critical imagery and enigmatic language—an admixture best described as uncanny.4 Indeed, the power of these images originates in their irreverent and disruptive pairings. A poetic resistance runs through the photographs that juxtapose the prosaic with the imaginary, creating dream worlds that are resplendent in color and feature alluring and enigmatic protagonists. While the photographs open into fantastic scenes or alternative realities, there is an element of crystalline realism, precision, and intricate planning in the making of the images.

It can be said that Absolutely Augmented Reality achieves a lyrical resonance by allowing the uncanny to emerge from veristic composition.

There is an unsettling hybridity in such works as the photograph of the woman wearing a crown of extinguished cigarette butts. Other images suggest a world of high-definition dreams, often introducing references to outmoded technology: the mysterious portrait of a woman wrapped in videotape on the seaside, or the woman holding a water-spewing

8

Notes

The Pictures: A New Genre of Narrative Portraiture

1 All artist statements and quotes are from a June 2019 interview with the author (Archives of Rosa JH Berland).

2 The photographs were taken with a medium format film camera (Hasselblad H1) and a 35mm film camera (Canon EOS1V) using Kodak Professional Ektar 100 color negative film.

3 Such a sense of rebellion, an interest in subversive image-making, and the inversion of hierarchies and canonical models are shared with other portraitists such as the contemporary photographer Romina Ressia and painter Kehinde Wiley. A connection to the approach of the American photographer Cindy Sherman should be noted in the sense that Song and Vostrikov engage in socially critical photography that also functions as a sort of otherworldly inverted form of portraiture. This is particularly true of works such as the picture of Vostrikov dressed in a Japanese kimono inscribed with the sign of American mass-produced culture—McDonald’s.

The image has a polemic intention, pointing to the erasure of ancient tradition in favor of, as the artist puts it, “cheap eats for depressed corporate workers. That is the future.”

4 “An uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor that contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Works in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, edited by J. Strachey (London: Vintage Classics, 2001), 243.

5 Ibid., 219–25.

6 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906), trans. Roy Sellars, in Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1995): 7–16.

7 Many of the photographs feature red hues that, according to Song, “correspond within Chinese culture to fire, space, as well as energy.”

8 To compare the work of Vostrikov and Song to a form of Surrealism or at least understand it in the context of that approach and sensibility, we should look toward the qualities of Veristic Surrealism. Specifically, we see the usage of dreamlike scenery depicted with a sense of clarity and accuracy. However, Vostrikov and Song also blend the intense richness of painterly color to achieve a fusion of the mediums.

9

rotary phone. Indeed, these hybrid images are replete with what Sigmund Freud described as heimlich/unheimlich (the familiar and unfamiliar).5 That which feels familiar and at the same time frightening is a recurring motif. There are endless examples in the series: a woman defying gravity while riding her red bike, a man painted a stark white with blue electronic wires sprouting from his head, his saintly pose a reimagining of the cyborg. As well, the observer can discern in the artists’ wedding of the animate with the inanimate the classic trope of the uncanny as explored by Freud and Ernst Jentsch, which still evokes a sense of intrigue and repulsion today.6 Throughout, a refined aesthetic and experimental approach governs much of the artists’ collaboration. The intricate and sustained planning process involved in creating these photographs reveals a theatrical ordering of a Dadaist sensibility, in which pageantry and elegance coexist with strangeness. Within these painterly pictures the viewer experiences a busy abundance of desire, hybridity, fantasy, eroticism, and symbolism.7 The artists characterize modern society as a site of erasure for artistic process and authorship, supplanted by an increasingly vapid engagement in technology and social media. As such, the artists take as their subject the intersection of new technology, social media, fine arts, and creative authorship through a series of richly saturated, theatrical, and symbolic images that use costume, character, and allegory to create a sense of exploration and melancholic intrigue.

Within these tableaux of imaginary worlds inflected with Dadaist and Surrealist sensibility, there lie the interrelated stories of two artists with entirely different backgrounds.

Absolutely Augmented Reality offers up a dream world of mysterious and alluring portraiture, suffused with a host of archetypal images, hybrid creatures, surreal motifs, and canonical postures, as well as inversions of iconic art historic references.8 These tableaux reflect an urge to create memory in the face of an ephemeral and constantly changing landscape of technology and form. In making these narratives, Song explains, she observes the fragility and “slipperiness of time and imagines the way in which life arose from nucleotides.”

As a collection of contemporary pictures that blur the lines between media—painting, film, and photography—this book is an invitation for the reader to enter a world of radical illusionism, a reassembling of captured imagination, memory, and history inflected by a profound precisionism. Absolutely Augmented Reality challenges and even inverts the conventions of portraiture, whether in painting or photography.

Still, at the same time there is an exaltation of the artistic mind as a wellspring of subjective, enigmatic beauty and ideas. In these evocative yet unsettling images, we discover remainders of memory, of history, of former lives, yet find ourselves mocked for our tethered relationship to technology and popular culture. The eyes of the artists guide us through the creation of an illusory world that oscillates between a sense of alienation and fantastically rich iconography.

of contemporary art, authorship, and technology and offers a newly subjective and visually intense view of the modern world. And so, while we search for reconciliation or closure in the story line, we may instead discover an alluring and enduring inscrutability.

In the Absolutely Augmented Reality series, carefully orchestrated mise-en-scène tableaux merge tropes from painting (including iconic imagery from Surrealism) with mysterious motifs, creating an unsettling, painterly collision of fantastic narrative and portraiture under the shadow of globalism.

In many of the pictures the artists have rearranged bodies, symbols, costumes, and imagery in a new and sometimes shocking manner, creating a new parallel world. There is a deliberate borrowing from popular culture, as well as from canonical modernist artists such as the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (for example, his scene of three men in bowler hats sitting facing the open sky by the seaside). Within this context, the artists play with the subversion of images to create a distinct visual language to construct strange worlds and strange inhabitants. A woman plunges through a red wall of clouds, only her bottom and legs remaining visible. One finds oneself immersed in pictorial puzzles at once disorienting and evocative of desire and wonderment.

And yet a distinguishing feature of Song’s and Vostrikov’s work is pictorial clarity reminiscent of classical portraiture in the way it surrounds the central subject with symbolic objects and environments.3 While the artists integrate models from Magritte, Surrealism, and Cubism as “part of the preserved past,” they also seek to create new imagery to “reveal something new for the critics and the audience.

When we talk about the analog form, we are talking about the past.

As if there is not a point anymore in dealing with outdated technologies, pressing records, developing film, buying brushes and canvases.”

Vostrikov and Song concentrate on the reexamination of mass media, the unrelenting ecosystem of social media and photography, wherein the pervasive world of images has become increasingly homogeneous.

In this view, subjectivity, creativity, and authorship are muted in an unrelenting process of erasure and silencing. The two artists extend their subject matter by exploring a set of themes at once interrelated and divergent. They situate their practice with juxtapositions of the familiar and unfamiliar, but it should also be noted that the stories unfolding in this work are unlike any other body of work and present an entirely new and riveting visual sensibility. As well, the oeuvre as a whole seems to oscillate between overtly symbolic critical imagery and enigmatic language—an admixture best described as uncanny.4 Indeed, the power of these images originates in their irreverent and disruptive pairings. A poetic resistance runs through the photographs that juxtapose the prosaic with the imaginary, creating dream worlds that are resplendent in color and feature alluring and enigmatic protagonists. While the photographs open into fantastic scenes or alternative realities, there is an element of crystalline realism, precision, and intricate planning in the making of the images.

It can be said that Absolutely Augmented Reality achieves a lyrical resonance by allowing the uncanny to emerge from veristic composition.

There is an unsettling hybridity in such works as the photograph of the woman wearing a crown of extinguished cigarette butts. Other images suggest a world of high-definition dreams, often introducing references to outmoded technology: the mysterious portrait of a woman wrapped in videotape on the seaside, or the woman holding a water-spewing

8

Notes

The Pictures: A New Genre of Narrative Portraiture

1 All artist statements and quotes are from a June 2019 interview with the author (Archives of Rosa JH Berland).

2 The photographs were taken with a medium format film camera (Hasselblad H1) and a 35mm film camera (Canon EOS1V) using Kodak Professional Ektar 100 color negative film.

3 Such a sense of rebellion, an interest in subversive image-making, and the inversion of hierarchies and canonical models are shared with other portraitists such as the contemporary photographer Romina Ressia and painter Kehinde Wiley. A connection to the approach of the American photographer Cindy Sherman should be noted in the sense that Song and Vostrikov engage in socially critical photography that also functions as a sort of otherworldly inverted form of portraiture. This is particularly true of works such as the picture of Vostrikov dressed in a Japanese kimono inscribed with the sign of American mass-produced culture—McDonald’s.

The image has a polemic intention, pointing to the erasure of ancient tradition in favor of, as the artist puts it, “cheap eats for depressed corporate workers. That is the future.”

4 “An uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor that contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Works in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, edited by J. Strachey (London: Vintage Classics, 2001), 243.

5 Ibid., 219–25.

6 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906), trans. Roy Sellars, in Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1995): 7–16.

7 Many of the photographs feature red hues that, according to Song, “correspond within Chinese culture to fire, space, as well as energy.”

8 To compare the work of Vostrikov and Song to a form of Surrealism or at least understand it in the context of that approach and sensibility, we should look toward the qualities of Veristic Surrealism. Specifically, we see the usage of dreamlike scenery depicted with a sense of clarity and accuracy. However, Vostrikov and Song also blend the intense richness of painterly color to achieve a fusion of the mediums.

9

rotary phone. Indeed, these hybrid images are replete with what Sigmund Freud described as heimlich/unheimlich (the familiar and unfamiliar).5 That which feels familiar and at the same time frightening is a recurring motif. There are endless examples in the series: a woman defying gravity while riding her red bike, a man painted a stark white with blue electronic wires sprouting from his head, his saintly pose a reimagining of the cyborg. As well, the observer can discern in the artists’ wedding of the animate with the inanimate the classic trope of the uncanny as explored by Freud and Ernst Jentsch, which still evokes a sense of intrigue and repulsion today.6 Throughout, a refined aesthetic and experimental approach governs much of the artists’ collaboration. The intricate and sustained planning process involved in creating these photographs reveals a theatrical ordering of a Dadaist sensibility, in which pageantry and elegance coexist with strangeness. Within these painterly pictures the viewer experiences a busy abundance of desire, hybridity, fantasy, eroticism, and symbolism.7 The artists characterize modern society as a site of erasure for artistic process and authorship, supplanted by an increasingly vapid engagement in technology and social media. As such, the artists take as their subject the intersection of new technology, social media, fine arts, and creative authorship through a series of richly saturated, theatrical, and symbolic images that use costume, character, and allegory to create a sense of exploration and melancholic intrigue.

Within these tableaux of imaginary worlds inflected with Dadaist and Surrealist sensibility, there lie the interrelated stories of two artists with entirely different backgrounds.

Absolutely Augmented Reality offers up a dream world of mysterious and alluring portraiture, suffused with a host of archetypal images, hybrid creatures, surreal motifs, and canonical postures, as well as inversions of iconic art historic references.8 These tableaux reflect an urge to create memory in the face of an ephemeral and constantly changing landscape of technology and form. In making these narratives, Song explains, she observes the fragility and “slipperiness of time and imagines the way in which life arose from nucleotides.”

As a collection of contemporary pictures that blur the lines between media—painting, film, and photography—this book is an invitation for the reader to enter a world of radical illusionism, a reassembling of captured imagination, memory, and history inflected by a profound precisionism. Absolutely Augmented Reality challenges and even inverts the conventions of portraiture, whether in painting or photography.

Still, at the same time there is an exaltation of the artistic mind as a wellspring of subjective, enigmatic beauty and ideas. In these evocative yet unsettling images, we discover remainders of memory, of history, of former lives, yet find ourselves mocked for our tethered relationship to technology and popular culture. The eyes of the artists guide us through the creation of an illusory world that oscillates between a sense of alienation and fantastically rich iconography.

10

Sketch for Joyful Tea Party

11

Sketch for Disappointment by Obviousness

10

Sketch for Joyful Tea Party

11

Sketch for Disappointment by Obviousness

Dreams, Memes & Metamorphoses Lilly Wei

12

Sketch for Harvest Home

13

Multimedia artists Kuzma Vostrikov and Ajuan Song, known as the international collaborative duo Kuzma & Ajuan, have created between them a full-spectrum dream world linked to a far-ranging and highly personalized archive of mutating references. Since they began working together around five years ago, they have evolved a series of fantastical, visually striking, elegantly styled and stylized multimedia installations where things are both not what they seem—and are. This intriguing, unsettling interchange of real and unreal, unreal and real has become their trademark.

The two met in New York not long after Song arrived in 2014.

She said she felt immediately at home although it was far from where she had been raised. She instinctively knew she could live and work here, in a place where the exploration of challenging ideas is encouraged and artists from around the world can meet and share their creative visions and histories, producing work together in a welcoming, secure environment. Both of them were captivated by New York’s promise of artistic freedom, its particular high-oxygen blend of anonymity and community, of creative energy and constant change, where the collision of cultures invigorated, providing the breath of life for imaginative endeavors. This is the catalyst that has intoxicated and inspired legions of artists before them and continues to do so. Even in a globalized art world of proliferating cultural hubs, New York remains a magnet.

Song was born into a traditional southern Chinese family with strict customs of decorum in a time and a country undergoing seismic upheavals—socially, politically, and economically. Studying science instead of art, she earned a degree in physics from Anqing University in Anhui province, China. But Song wanted greater independence and because of that, she eventually arrived in New York. Once there, she attended the International Center for Photography and Pratt Institute, where she focused on photography and other disciplines, all of which have been instrumental in the formation of her wide-ranging, idiosyncratic practice.

Vostrikov was born in New York but, like Song, was raised in a country with an autocratic government and a history that has been equally turbulent: Russia. Unlike her, however, his parents were artists and supportive of his desire to follow in their footsteps although he, too, has a technical degree, an MA in engineering from Moscow State Technical University. Song invited Vostrikov to work with her and he reciprocated. Soon, they joined creative forces (although both also maintain individual practices) in what became a very fortunate pairing.

They proved to be ideal partners for each other, their projects enhanced by the intuitive rapport that exists between them as artists and as outsiders and emigrés, even if from different heritages.

Vostrikov works in several disciplines, although filmmaking is his primary love and photography a close second. Their similarities in mediums and points of view initially connected them, but with enough divergence of cultures and temperament to provide frisson, to make work alchemized by their mutual input. This led to a body of conceptual photography and installations that reflects the wide scope of their interests: technology, psychology, philosophy, history, art history—in particular painting and conceptual art, as well as photography and film.

The bridge they envision between East and West is sly, mischievous, sometimes ironic, girded by existentialism and nihilism; Confucianism and Daoism; romanticism and rationalism; individualism and the communal; fine art, graphic design, and commercial art. Asianness, however, seems dominant, at least in surface appearance, since most of the models are Asian. But that is deceptive, merely the first layer,

Dreams, Memes & Metamorphoses Lilly Wei

12

Sketch for Harvest Home

13

Multimedia artists Kuzma Vostrikov and Ajuan Song, known as the international collaborative duo Kuzma & Ajuan, have created between them a full-spectrum dream world linked to a far-ranging and highly personalized archive of mutating references. Since they began working together around five years ago, they have evolved a series of fantastical, visually striking, elegantly styled and stylized multimedia installations where things are both not what they seem—and are. This intriguing, unsettling interchange of real and unreal, unreal and real has become their trademark.

The two met in New York not long after Song arrived in 2014.

She said she felt immediately at home although it was far from where she had been raised. She instinctively knew she could live and work here, in a place where the exploration of challenging ideas is encouraged and artists from around the world can meet and share their creative visions and histories, producing work together in a welcoming, secure environment. Both of them were captivated by New York’s promise of artistic freedom, its particular high-oxygen blend of anonymity and community, of creative energy and constant change, where the collision of cultures invigorated, providing the breath of life for imaginative endeavors. This is the catalyst that has intoxicated and inspired legions of artists before them and continues to do so. Even in a globalized art world of proliferating cultural hubs, New York remains a magnet.

Song was born into a traditional southern Chinese family with strict customs of decorum in a time and a country undergoing seismic upheavals—socially, politically, and economically. Studying science instead of art, she earned a degree in physics from Anqing University in Anhui province, China. But Song wanted greater independence and because of that, she eventually arrived in New York. Once there, she attended the International Center for Photography and Pratt Institute, where she focused on photography and other disciplines, all of which have been instrumental in the formation of her wide-ranging, idiosyncratic practice.

Vostrikov was born in New York but, like Song, was raised in a country with an autocratic government and a history that has been equally turbulent: Russia. Unlike her, however, his parents were artists and supportive of his desire to follow in their footsteps although he, too, has a technical degree, an MA in engineering from Moscow State Technical University. Song invited Vostrikov to work with her and he reciprocated. Soon, they joined creative forces (although both also maintain individual practices) in what became a very fortunate pairing.

They proved to be ideal partners for each other, their projects enhanced by the intuitive rapport that exists between them as artists and as outsiders and emigrés, even if from different heritages.

Vostrikov works in several disciplines, although filmmaking is his primary love and photography a close second. Their similarities in mediums and points of view initially connected them, but with enough divergence of cultures and temperament to provide frisson, to make work alchemized by their mutual input. This led to a body of conceptual photography and installations that reflects the wide scope of their interests: technology, psychology, philosophy, history, art history—in particular painting and conceptual art, as well as photography and film.

The bridge they envision between East and West is sly, mischievous, sometimes ironic, girded by existentialism and nihilism; Confucianism and Daoism; romanticism and rationalism; individualism and the communal; fine art, graphic design, and commercial art. Asianness, however, seems dominant, at least in surface appearance, since most of the models are Asian. But that is deceptive, merely the first layer,

since the depictions are as much, if not more, Western in form and reference. Their backgrounds for instance, against which the figures are staged, are often composed of brilliantly saturated color, summoning to mind modernist conventions such as geometric abstraction, its architectonics and, within that, monochrome, its most reductive expression. But the duo’s photographs also feature landscapes, and touch on all manner of styles across art historical periods.

When beginning a work, they seldom know in advance what the resolution will ultimately be—their process is deliberately fluid, openended. They toss ideas back and forth, trying this and that, improvising, a process that often requires a lengthy gestation period. The interval between the original conception and the finished project is usually quite long, they told me. And “finished” is perhaps the wrong word, since what they work on is ongoing. It is not so much concluded as it is momentarily paused, to be further explicated and extended.

Their most ambitious project to date is Absolutely Augmented Reality (AAR), a series that has engrossed them since 2017. They have spun off a number of iterations of it that might be called chapters in a serialization of an inconclusive narrative, one that has been translated into pictures. The two most recent installations of AAR were 8 ½ Anti-Social Masks for Instagram and Wonder without Land.

When I visited them in their Bushwick studio earlier this fall, Song and Vostrikov stressed to me that this series must be considered a single work, one that consists of multiple micro-stories, their sequencing variable. Edited down to a hundred images, they have a trove of pictures from which any number of different exhibitions can be created, or “even a short film,” Vostrikov said. They typically feature scenes centered on a fashionable, willowy Asian woman or two or three, an Asian male or two, and a few European men (surrogates for Song and Vostrikov?).

The models are calculatedly, meticulously groomed, modishly outfitted, given props, and then photographed, often in improbable poses.

The scenes are surreal, absurdist, or comic; at times, they have an erotic whiff, a poignant undercurrent, a darker mood. Provocative and diverting, they offer the viewer various readings to interpret and mull over, to unravel. The viewer should also look for art historical quotes and disassemble the clever, low-tech trompe-l’oeil tricks used in their tongue-in-cheek constructions, the visual equivalent of the literary convention of the unreliable narrator.

The narration is associational, not linear, “a chain of memories, a stream of consciousness,” the projects sometimes activated by a “story, a character, a shadow, a light,” Vostrikov said. He compares the photographs to a series of “short stories,” each a “small experience” that is cumulative and can be shifted around. The story line is driven by emotive states of being such as empathy, anxiety, intimacy, sorrow, playfulness, and more—not by plot.

It is this interchangeability and the accretive meanings of the individual photographs within the capacious, shapeshifting space of the whole that are visually and metaphorically significant, transforming what might be incidental and of little note into a trajectory of instants that very much matter, as such instants do in reality, adding up to a life.

They conjure their social and cultural heritages as both an embrace and a way to free themselves from their personal legacies, poised on the cusp of past and present. They also question the nature of such memorializing and the structure of documentation and documentaries, aiming to disrupt the formulaic through irritants and dissonances, comparable, perhaps, to the introduction of a grain of sand that forces the oyster to produce pearls.

14

The rearrangements and interpretations of each project are dependent upon the response between the architecture and the installation. All installations are, to a greater or lesser degree, but Kuzma & Ajuan make it a critical part of the process. The placement of the individual images is carefully calibrated, establishing a rhythm that is cinematic but also musical, the spaces between each photograph like rests in a score. Since Vostrikov is a filmmaker, it is not surprising that there are nods to film history and methods throughout AAR. In the titles, for instance, such as 8 ½ Anti-Social Masks for Instagram that brings to mind Fellini’s great film, 8 ½, based on the fantasies of its main character, a film director; in the use of a storyboard and “stills”; and in the inclusion of a temporal element in the stretched-out horizontal hanging of the pictures. They can’t be seen all at once but rely on time, like movies, or like Chinese scroll paintings where only a section is visible at any given moment, signifying the passage of time in actual space and real time as the viewer moves from picture to picture and in represented time as, for instance, the depicted seasons change and the same characters move across the surface, appearing in different episodes: a pre-cinematic device that appears continuously throughout the history of art.

Photographs, however, are also a way to stop time.

Vostrikov and Song said that the images they took for AAR were intended to suggest paintings. The equivalence pleased them, since it emblematically combined photography and painting in a convergence of old and new technologies. They then framed them as if they were paintings, another instance of their sense of perceptual play. They also told me that they don’t manipulate the images afterward or do postproduction work on the computer, with the exception of some color adjustments. Rather wonderfully, their notion of absolutely augmented reality does not absolutely depend on the digital, it seems.

Influenced by numerous directors who range from Fellini to Antonioni to Tarkovsky, their references, as noted, are eclectic and crosscultural, plundered from Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Montaigne, Sei Shōnagon, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the I Ching, and much more. The photographs reverberate with tremors of Andy Warhol, Justine Kurland (three young women with musical instruments in a clearing in the woods), Laurie Simmons (a female figure kicking her legs upward, the rest of her body hidden by a wooden tub, schematically sketched black wings zigzagging up her thighs), and so many others, often made glossier and stranger.

Some of the subjects look us in the eyes absorbing our gaze, like the woman with her head tightly capped by cigarette butts, bits of tobacco escaping from beneath them, flattened packs of cigarettes arranged in a grid in the background. Perhaps it represents a protest against the hazards of smoking, a real and metaphoric comment on the fatality of overconsumption and malicious persuasion in an age of wanton excess and lack of accountability. Curiously, they make me think of the snailshell curls that are characteristic of the Buddha, transmogrified into something less benign, less beneficent. And here’s another fanciful association—they might also symbolize the litter of contested ideas emerging from her mind, or any mind, its ephemerality materialized, made visible, the butts a pictorial pun for “but,” a word that invariably precedes a disagreement, an argument. Some avert our gaze, like the androgynous person with his or her oddly pale, unfathomable eyes cast downward, elfin ears positioned incongruously high, all in black, who, with just those slight tweaks from the commonplace, is made disconcertingly, disturbingly alien, even ominous.

15

since the depictions are as much, if not more, Western in form and reference. Their backgrounds for instance, against which the figures are staged, are often composed of brilliantly saturated color, summoning to mind modernist conventions such as geometric abstraction, its architectonics and, within that, monochrome, its most reductive expression. But the duo’s photographs also feature landscapes, and touch on all manner of styles across art historical periods.

When beginning a work, they seldom know in advance what the resolution will ultimately be—their process is deliberately fluid, openended. They toss ideas back and forth, trying this and that, improvising, a process that often requires a lengthy gestation period. The interval between the original conception and the finished project is usually quite long, they told me. And “finished” is perhaps the wrong word, since what they work on is ongoing. It is not so much concluded as it is momentarily paused, to be further explicated and extended.

Their most ambitious project to date is Absolutely Augmented Reality (AAR), a series that has engrossed them since 2017. They have spun off a number of iterations of it that might be called chapters in a serialization of an inconclusive narrative, one that has been translated into pictures. The two most recent installations of AAR were 8 ½ Anti-Social Masks for Instagram and Wonder without Land.

When I visited them in their Bushwick studio earlier this fall, Song and Vostrikov stressed to me that this series must be considered a single work, one that consists of multiple micro-stories, their sequencing variable. Edited down to a hundred images, they have a trove of pictures from which any number of different exhibitions can be created, or “even a short film,” Vostrikov said. They typically feature scenes centered on a fashionable, willowy Asian woman or two or three, an Asian male or two, and a few European men (surrogates for Song and Vostrikov?).

The models are calculatedly, meticulously groomed, modishly outfitted, given props, and then photographed, often in improbable poses.

The scenes are surreal, absurdist, or comic; at times, they have an erotic whiff, a poignant undercurrent, a darker mood. Provocative and diverting, they offer the viewer various readings to interpret and mull over, to unravel. The viewer should also look for art historical quotes and disassemble the clever, low-tech trompe-l’oeil tricks used in their tongue-in-cheek constructions, the visual equivalent of the literary convention of the unreliable narrator.

The narration is associational, not linear, “a chain of memories, a stream of consciousness,” the projects sometimes activated by a “story, a character, a shadow, a light,” Vostrikov said. He compares the photographs to a series of “short stories,” each a “small experience” that is cumulative and can be shifted around. The story line is driven by emotive states of being such as empathy, anxiety, intimacy, sorrow, playfulness, and more—not by plot.

It is this interchangeability and the accretive meanings of the individual photographs within the capacious, shapeshifting space of the whole that are visually and metaphorically significant, transforming what might be incidental and of little note into a trajectory of instants that very much matter, as such instants do in reality, adding up to a life.

They conjure their social and cultural heritages as both an embrace and a way to free themselves from their personal legacies, poised on the cusp of past and present. They also question the nature of such memorializing and the structure of documentation and documentaries, aiming to disrupt the formulaic through irritants and dissonances, comparable, perhaps, to the introduction of a grain of sand that forces the oyster to produce pearls.

14

The rearrangements and interpretations of each project are dependent upon the response between the architecture and the installation. All installations are, to a greater or lesser degree, but Kuzma & Ajuan make it a critical part of the process. The placement of the individual images is carefully calibrated, establishing a rhythm that is cinematic but also musical, the spaces between each photograph like rests in a score. Since Vostrikov is a filmmaker, it is not surprising that there are nods to film history and methods throughout AAR. In the titles, for instance, such as 8 ½ Anti-Social Masks for Instagram that brings to mind Fellini’s great film, 8 ½, based on the fantasies of its main character, a film director; in the use of a storyboard and “stills”; and in the inclusion of a temporal element in the stretched-out horizontal hanging of the pictures. They can’t be seen all at once but rely on time, like movies, or like Chinese scroll paintings where only a section is visible at any given moment, signifying the passage of time in actual space and real time as the viewer moves from picture to picture and in represented time as, for instance, the depicted seasons change and the same characters move across the surface, appearing in different episodes: a pre-cinematic device that appears continuously throughout the history of art.

Photographs, however, are also a way to stop time.

Vostrikov and Song said that the images they took for AAR were intended to suggest paintings. The equivalence pleased them, since it emblematically combined photography and painting in a convergence of old and new technologies. They then framed them as if they were paintings, another instance of their sense of perceptual play. They also told me that they don’t manipulate the images afterward or do postproduction work on the computer, with the exception of some color adjustments. Rather wonderfully, their notion of absolutely augmented reality does not absolutely depend on the digital, it seems.

Influenced by numerous directors who range from Fellini to Antonioni to Tarkovsky, their references, as noted, are eclectic and crosscultural, plundered from Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Montaigne, Sei Shōnagon, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the I Ching, and much more. The photographs reverberate with tremors of Andy Warhol, Justine Kurland (three young women with musical instruments in a clearing in the woods), Laurie Simmons (a female figure kicking her legs upward, the rest of her body hidden by a wooden tub, schematically sketched black wings zigzagging up her thighs), and so many others, often made glossier and stranger.

Some of the subjects look us in the eyes absorbing our gaze, like the woman with her head tightly capped by cigarette butts, bits of tobacco escaping from beneath them, flattened packs of cigarettes arranged in a grid in the background. Perhaps it represents a protest against the hazards of smoking, a real and metaphoric comment on the fatality of overconsumption and malicious persuasion in an age of wanton excess and lack of accountability. Curiously, they make me think of the snailshell curls that are characteristic of the Buddha, transmogrified into something less benign, less beneficent. And here’s another fanciful association—they might also symbolize the litter of contested ideas emerging from her mind, or any mind, its ephemerality materialized, made visible, the butts a pictorial pun for “but,” a word that invariably precedes a disagreement, an argument. Some avert our gaze, like the androgynous person with his or her oddly pale, unfathomable eyes cast downward, elfin ears positioned incongruously high, all in black, who, with just those slight tweaks from the commonplace, is made disconcertingly, disturbingly alien, even ominous.

15

Quite a number of the figures have their backs resolutely turned away from us, gazing intently into the plane of the photograph, into fictive space, existing in their own illusionistic realm, like the splendid still life with a nude perched gracefully on a Madame Récamier-like couch, a voluptuous pumpkin standing in for her buttocks. Another such picture shows three men in dark suits and bowler hats on a beach, facing the sea and sky, contemplating the horizon. They might be seated on the sand or they might be buried in it up to their backsides, or they even might be standing (the strip of beach in the foreground is questionable in nature, setting off alarms—as intended—but you can decide for yourself or come up with other interpretations). However you might read it, it’s a riveting mix of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and the Belgian surrealist René Magritte with a pinch of Beckett thrown in, at the very least.

Another image focuses on a single figure turned toward the viewer, although whether male or female, Asian or Caucasian is not discernible.

The face is hidden by a cascade of tawny hair (a wig) and a guitar, the figure standing in an undefined location as if somewhere above this world, surrounded by suspended clumps of cotton batting for clouds, evoking both Picasso and Magritte. Then there is the woman in bright red pedaling an equally red bicycle that seems embedded in the wall at a right angle to the ground in a gravity-defying position, although it, too, can be decoded for the optical feints used to create that illusion.

And while it is truly an uphill Sisyphean task, she seems to do it effortlessly. It might also be an oblique tribute to Italian film director Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece of Neorealism, The Bicycle Thief.

It also makes me think of the famous dance scene in Royal Wedding beloved of film buffs in which Fred Astaire appears to dance up the walls and upside down onto the ceiling of his hotel room in pure exuberant joy.

Chairs also abound, but it is not always clear if they are two-or three-dimensional—or both—in the photographs as, once again, the real clashes with the constructed. These chairs don’t function in a normal way either, that is, they don’t stand firmly on the ground so they can’t be sat upon. More often, they are precariously placed and unstable, subverting the ordinariness of this utilitarian object and turning it into something suspect and disorienting, a strategy they expertly wield.

One example is the red and black chair painted on a pink wall as if it were suspended, parts of a female body poking through from behind (maybe more than one?), real head, hands, legs thrust awkwardly akimbo, half-seated, half slipping off the painted fake chair, wearing teal green fishnet stockings and yellow stilettos that contribute additional color, the whole a kind of exuberant, if also uneasy paean to Asian and Western pop.

Some images have the luxurious look of features for high-end fashion publications like Vogue. One such is the glamorous woman on a beach at twilight (or daybreak, but the mood signals a closure more than a new dawn), gowned in streaming ribbons of shining dark film. She seems pensive, the opposite of the radiantly illuminated female figure draped in white, torch held triumphantly aloft, which is the current version of the nearly century-old logo for Columbia Pictures. Kuzma & Ajuan’s image reminds us that analog film might soon be obsolete, as well as what a storied history it has had. It is a medium of unprecedented outreach and impact, representing the dreams of billions. Entering the lives of nearly everyone on Earth, it has irrevocably blurred the boundaries between illusion and reality, fact and fiction, the narratives and characters in film as vividly present, if not more so, than reality.

16

Vostrikov and Song are not particularly concerned about the crossing of those boundaries where the beautiful, the grotesque, the surreal, the sublime, good and evil, all recurrent themes, encounter each other and intertwine, as well as that of old and new technologies, another theme that threads itself throughout their projects. It is a rich territory they lay claim to, to see what might be lost, found, and recuperated, which they do with sensitivity, panache, and mordant humor. “It is not about escape but about possibilities. We want to reflect our times. We are concerned with being human and we are searching for ways to talk about standardization, homogenization, new societies and cultures, and also about disparate societies and cultures. Creation is always accompanied by conflict. We are sending a message in a bottle, tossing it into the water. We don’t know where it will end up.”

17

Sketch for Just to Land in Tokyo

Quite a number of the figures have their backs resolutely turned away from us, gazing intently into the plane of the photograph, into fictive space, existing in their own illusionistic realm, like the splendid still life with a nude perched gracefully on a Madame Récamier-like couch, a voluptuous pumpkin standing in for her buttocks. Another such picture shows three men in dark suits and bowler hats on a beach, facing the sea and sky, contemplating the horizon. They might be seated on the sand or they might be buried in it up to their backsides, or they even might be standing (the strip of beach in the foreground is questionable in nature, setting off alarms—as intended—but you can decide for yourself or come up with other interpretations). However you might read it, it’s a riveting mix of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and the Belgian surrealist René Magritte with a pinch of Beckett thrown in, at the very least.

Another image focuses on a single figure turned toward the viewer, although whether male or female, Asian or Caucasian is not discernible.

The face is hidden by a cascade of tawny hair (a wig) and a guitar, the figure standing in an undefined location as if somewhere above this world, surrounded by suspended clumps of cotton batting for clouds, evoking both Picasso and Magritte. Then there is the woman in bright red pedaling an equally red bicycle that seems embedded in the wall at a right angle to the ground in a gravity-defying position, although it, too, can be decoded for the optical feints used to create that illusion.

And while it is truly an uphill Sisyphean task, she seems to do it effortlessly. It might also be an oblique tribute to Italian film director Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece of Neorealism, The Bicycle Thief.

It also makes me think of the famous dance scene in Royal Wedding beloved of film buffs in which Fred Astaire appears to dance up the walls and upside down onto the ceiling of his hotel room in pure exuberant joy.

Chairs also abound, but it is not always clear if they are two-or three-dimensional—or both—in the photographs as, once again, the real clashes with the constructed. These chairs don’t function in a normal way either, that is, they don’t stand firmly on the ground so they can’t be sat upon. More often, they are precariously placed and unstable, subverting the ordinariness of this utilitarian object and turning it into something suspect and disorienting, a strategy they expertly wield.

One example is the red and black chair painted on a pink wall as if it were suspended, parts of a female body poking through from behind (maybe more than one?), real head, hands, legs thrust awkwardly akimbo, half-seated, half slipping off the painted fake chair, wearing teal green fishnet stockings and yellow stilettos that contribute additional color, the whole a kind of exuberant, if also uneasy paean to Asian and Western pop.

Some images have the luxurious look of features for high-end fashion publications like Vogue. One such is the glamorous woman on a beach at twilight (or daybreak, but the mood signals a closure more than a new dawn), gowned in streaming ribbons of shining dark film. She seems pensive, the opposite of the radiantly illuminated female figure draped in white, torch held triumphantly aloft, which is the current version of the nearly century-old logo for Columbia Pictures. Kuzma & Ajuan’s image reminds us that analog film might soon be obsolete, as well as what a storied history it has had. It is a medium of unprecedented outreach and impact, representing the dreams of billions. Entering the lives of nearly everyone on Earth, it has irrevocably blurred the boundaries between illusion and reality, fact and fiction, the narratives and characters in film as vividly present, if not more so, than reality.

16

Vostrikov and Song are not particularly concerned about the crossing of those boundaries where the beautiful, the grotesque, the surreal, the sublime, good and evil, all recurrent themes, encounter each other and intertwine, as well as that of old and new technologies, another theme that threads itself throughout their projects. It is a rich territory they lay claim to, to see what might be lost, found, and recuperated, which they do with sensitivity, panache, and mordant humor. “It is not about escape but about possibilities. We want to reflect our times. We are concerned with being human and we are searching for ways to talk about standardization, homogenization, new societies and cultures, and also about disparate societies and cultures. Creation is always accompanied by conflict. We are sending a message in a bottle, tossing it into the water. We don’t know where it will end up.”

17

Sketch for Just to Land in Tokyo

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Trash Bathing � Waiting

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Trash Bathing � Waiting