Taras Polataiko: Remediation

Ukrainian Institute of America is pleased to announce the opening of REMEDIATION, an exhibition by Ukrainian-Canadian artist Taras Polataiko. The show will be on view from November 24 through December 24, 2009. A reception for the artist will be held on Tuesday evening, November 24, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

The exhibition will feature paintings from GLARE and CUT series, a photographic series HUMAN LOCOMOTION, the video works KYIV CLASSICAL and DREAMS, and a sound sculpture PYRAMID. Much of the work in the show revisits seminal moments of art history and concerns itself with the practice of remediation.

GLARE is a series of paintings of photographs of paintings. The artist photographed reproductions of Kazimir Malevich’s abstractions and used the photographs as a source for his paintings. The bent pages of the art books intensify the reflection of light and serve as Polataiko’s interpretation of Malevich’s concept of «additional element.» The series documents the traces of multiple media—paint, paper, print, photograph—in creating artworks through which the artist envisions the essence of Malevich’s theory of art.

Polataiko’s CUT paintings seem to be identical to Lucio Fontana’s series TAGLI, but there is no actual cut on the canvas; his work is a painting of a cut. Polataiko complicates the relationship between the viewer and an art object, which looks what it is not—an optical illusion, a trompe l'oeil.

In photographic series HUMAN LOCOMOTION, he focuses on the origin of fascination with the moving image and the desire to capture it. The models are reenacting poses from Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic stop-motion project. Whereas Muybridge used a rapid shutter speed to freeze his subjects’ natural motions, Polataiko reverses the experiment by asking his models to imitate one single frame of Muybridge’s sequence. They try to stay motionless but fail; a record of their failure captured by light and celluloid.

In KYIV CLASSICAL, Polataiko investigates the disappearance of commemorative plaque from the wall of The Four Tower Building in Bad Ems (Germany) where Russian Czar Alexander II signed a secret edit prohibiting the use of the Ukrainian language in 1876, including printing of Ukrainian lyrics to musical scores. Confronting the violence of historical erasure, Polataiko turns a trace of the vandalized plaque on the wall of the building into a glowing monochromatic painting. The installation included a looped soundtrack of the signing of a canary cultivated by Ukrainian ornithologists and named «Kyiv Classical.» The bird’s signing is wordless. It requires neither score nor permission.


Polataiko’s solo exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; Sable-Castelli Gallery (Toronto), Priska C. Juschka Fine Art; Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral (Frankfurt, Germany); Winnipeg Art Gallery; Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland); Soros International Center for Contemporary Art (Kyiv, Ukraine); Diane Farris Gallery (Vancouver); Art Gallery of Hamilton; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Victoria).

Selected group exhibitions include: Museé d’Art Contemporain de Montreal; Lombard-Freid Projects (New York), Antoni Tapies Foundation (Barcelona, Spain), CAAM (Las Palmas, Spain), Artspace (Sydney, Australia), Artspeak Gallery (Vancouver), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade, Serbia) and National Museum of Art (Lithuania).

In 2002 Polataiko represented Ukraine at the 25th São Paulo Biennale. In 2009 he participated in the International Incheon Biennale in South Korea and Volta 5: Age of Anxiety in Basel, Switzerland. His upcoming exhibitions include Priska C. Juschka Fine Art (New York), Pulse Miami, Barbara Edwards Contemporary (Toronto) and Galerie U7 (Frankfurt). He is currently based in Vancouver.

Curators: Svitlana Matviyenko and Walter Hoydysh

For more information:
Ukrainian Institute of America and Walter Hoydysh (212) 288-8660
Svitlana Matviyenko (573) 673-4215 and svitlana.matviyenko@gmail.com
Taras Polataiko (250) 564-5045 and tarasp@shaw.ca