ArtXchange Gallery presents Between Dreams, featuring new paintings and sculptures by Alla Goniodsky. In her new series, Goniodsky explores the liminal spaces of memory at the border of dream and wakefulness, hovering between the tangible and abstract.
Goniodsky is a Russian-born stage designer, puppet-maker, painter and sculptor. After studying at the State Academy of Art and the St. Petersburg Theatrical Academy, she enjoyed a successful career as a theatrical designer. Now residing in the Pacific Northwest, she is a full-time artist and private art instructor.
Goniodsky’s atmospheric paintings are universal yet personal, evoking hazy impressions of landscapes from the past and leaving room for the viewer to connect to their own personal narrative. Painting with oil on either canvas or panel, Goniodsky employs unusual techniques including pouring, heating, and dripping to create flowing layers that build into compositions full of movement and light.
Inspired by her production work in the theatre, Goniodsky expands her two-dimensional paintings and drawings into sculptural forms, as if the characters of her imagination are coming to life. Goniodsky’s new sculptures are mosaic assemblages that utilize fragments of porcelain mortared with concrete to create charming creatures that exist only in dream-worlds or mythology.
The contrast of the delicate porcelain and utilitarian concrete in Goniodsky’s new sculptures highlights this idea of the intangible and being between worlds; “These works carry a large personal significance for me, as I personally live between two worlds,” writes the artist. “Having left my homeland of Russia more than twenty years ago to live in the U.S and raise my family here, I am permanently caught in between languages, countries and cultures. Hence, I am forever in between the concrete and the abstract, and my landscapes and creatures carry those subtexts.”