Iragui Projects Gallery, in collaboration with Gallery 9B, presents an exhibition of new works by Dima Kadyntsev, "Grey Gardens." The artist continues the explorations he began during art residencies in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, where he not only worked with painting, graphics, and objects made from ceramics and scrap materials, but also experimented with analog photography, printing, and situational installations.

At last year's artist-talk "Why Do We Create Art?" at the Garage Museum, Dima compared artistic practice to a modern form of subsistence farming and the cultivation of "strange fruits and vegetables." In this process, he is most interested in nature itself, including the nature of art and the nature of time, measured by moments of encounters and pauses. These successive moments become a single thread in space, where the mundane is inseparable from the artistic, the made from the found, and the observer from the observed.

The project's title refers to the poster for the documentary film "Grey Gardens" (1975), which is kept in Dima's studio among other images printed from the internet. The film, in turn, is named after a dilapidated mansion whose inhabitants have lost touch with the outside world and the present. However, nature abhors emptiness and regret, and life in "Grey Gardens" continues, as does the movement of Kadyntsev's characters toward one another.

A still shot by Dima on black-and-white film was used for the exhibition poster. It depicts one of the "strange fruits" that ripened in the artist's studio.

Elmira Minkina, curator