Anastasia Lukomskaya

 
 

In emigration, the optics of perception of the homeland changes greatly. Memories, relationships, sensory sensations crystallize into a collective image, in many ways deceptive, idealized, but intuitively close. Homeland is not as an idea or concept, but as a set of smells, combinations of colors, sounds, details. It is because of this image that many return – and discover that it was a trap, a mirage, and that the country they left from is long gone.

 

This is how co-dependent women who escaped from an abuser remember only the most romantic moments. This is how drug addicts who have quit filter out from their memory overdoses, the deaths of their comrades, humiliations, but carefully, like a jewel, keep in their hearts the very best trip in the world.

 

In emigration, there are special dreams in which everything is mixed up, one location flows into another, and the seasons merge together, houses and objects are in the wrong place, but it doesn’t matter, because this is the very place where you can’t get to anymore. I asked the Midhourney 5 neural network to draw these dreams for me, generating collages from the photos that I had from Russia, and then I painted pictures based on these generations. My lost homeland goes through a chain of cognitive distortions – first in my memory, then in the impersonal brain of the neural network, and again – when trying to adapt these memories to my ideas about painting. A paradox, but that's what makes them even more mine.