Sasha Filimonov

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

● Monday March 8th ○ After a mounting panic regarding the state of the world and my practice in relation; I had broken. Eastern oil disputes gave premonitions of a cratering of market prices in the same night I had rediscovered Walter Benjamin. ○ The past 6 months of work in my studio were crumbling in front of me, just like the world. ○ The work and its ideas had been contingent on the generally accepted infallibility of the institutions of the art world and beyond. My body of work up to this point was a siren or rallying call, using propaganda and dictatorial visual language to convey that the institutions and those that believed in them were impotent. Using the clearly constructed, theatrical nature of these pieces I hoped to communicate that the audience’s reality was equally fabricated, and as such, was changeable. I wanted to shed light upon the presuppositions people had about their realities, specifically about power and the human cost of its maintenance. Political and academic rhetoric up to this point was a vapid self replicating nightmare. No progress was made, no sacrifices taken, just a purgatory built in a centrist’s wet dream. ○ But all of this became self evident thanks to the divine violence of a contemporary plague. A pale horse and its rider came down and made the infirmity of a great many institutions and their constituents vividly clear; with a brilliance undeniable to any viewer. ○ Thus my work had been destroyed and I had been liberated. ○ Once...

Artwork