Inna Razumova – Happy Hunting Grounds
Opening reception: Friday, Dec 3: 6-9pm
Closing reception: Saturday, Dec 11: 6-9pm
also open: Dec 4, 5: 3-6pm
and other days by appointment: e-mail.
Inna Razumova was born in Moscow, Russia, and has been living in California since 1991. She studied at Stroganov School of Art in Moscow and graduated from UCLA in 1996 with a BFA in Painting. In 2003 she received her MFA from CADRE Laboratory for Digital Media Art at San Jose State University.
Inna is a full-time faculty in the Art Department at the City College of San Francisco and has exhibited her work in venues such as GenArt (San Francisco), Institute of Contemporary Arts (San Jose), and internationally at MAD´03 NET (Madrid, Spain), Museum of Contemporary Art (Krasnoyarsk, Russia), and the 2006 International Symposium of Electronic Art (San Jose, CA).
Artist Statement
My work can be envisioned as commentary on the fluctuating membrane between science, art, and fable, so that the distinctions between myth and reality are intentionally collapsed. Among my influences are medieval manuscripts, biological illustration, architectural garden plans, old maps, curiousity cabinets, and natural history.
“Happy Hunting Grounds” recreates the imaginary biota of paradise together with its fragmented history and mythology. I draw inspiration from the medieval gardens of sins and delights, the Romantic dream of earthly paradise, paleontological reconstructions of primordial gardens, Baroque arcadia, and other idyllic, exotic, utopian, or prehistoric landscapes. I wanted to explore the visual implications of the garden on a variety of scales (from macro- to microscopic), and as a stage for the interplay between the human desire for natural order and the allure of scientific, environmental, and spiritual utopia.
Happy hunting ground is known as a Cherokee hunter’s afterlife. It is a place teeming with animals and largely devoid of people, as earthly paradises tend to be. It is also a liminal space, where one is not quite inside or outside, in paradise or in prison, at home or forever lost, leaping in ecstasy or locked in rigor mortis. Paradise is a place of ambiguity – populated by chimeras and a chimera itself.
