Zero Advice Given, Artissima Fair 2023, Installation View

For the 2023 edition of Artissima, Management presents a site-specific solo project with Magadan-born, New York-based artist Vladislav Markov that includes an installation of vertical blinds along the perimeter of the booth, radiating an orange light from behind as if a sunset glow, and three new paintings mounted in front of the blinds on pipes jutting out from the walls.

The blinds refer to standardized decor in corporate settings in the United States, including medical offices and hospitals. Markov has spent many hours watching over his sister as she received chemotherapy in rooms that feature windows along with said blinds, designed specifically for these durational procedures. Chemotherapy can damage nerves in a side effect termed peripheral neuropathy. Patients could feel burning or numbness in the hands or feet, or experience extreme sensitivity to cold, known as dysesthesia. While this is happening to the person receiving the procedure, you as the spectator sit uselessly and watch the sun go down behind the blinds.

The dissonance experienced by the dissociation from Markov’s pre-immigration childhood experiences adds a surreal tint to the setting of the hospital room because, in post-Soviet Eastern European countries, the broad vertical blinds are associated with a nouveau bourgeoisie home renovation aesthetic that became popular in the 90s among the wealthy, characterized by overpriced Western materials. Markov’s paintings reference this complex process of dissociation by obscuring quotidian found objects in a process of digitally re-creating them from low-fidelity 3D scans done in his studio, transposing the viewer into a liminal mental space where the distance from perception to recognition becomes impossible to traverse.