Artist's Bio

Alla Esipovich

Alla Esipovich was born in Leningrad, graduated from the State University of Arts and Culture majoring in Cultural Studies and Art-expertise.
Attended the photographic authors course of American photographer Deborah Turbeville and participated in the joint exhibition in the State Museum of History of Saint-Petersburg in 2002.
The principal driving force behind Esipovich’s visual narratives is the texture of psychological relations between her models, of harmony and dissonance.
Decades ago surrealistic photography, actively involved with the psychical, often used the technique of doubling, even though the goal of the surrealists was to stress the mirror-effect of the camera, which created the twin image of what existed in reality. The double portraits made by Esipovich have a different message, even though she also uses the doubling motive. Here the metaphor of the mirror-image is manifested in the way the models co-exist, in how they position themselves towards one another in space, in how they reflect (not so much in the mimetic sense, but psychologically-emotionally) one another.
In her best works the artist grasps these relations not by showing postures (frequently the woman stands at a distance, re-reflecting the energy aimed at her), but in spatial pauses, caesuras.
Esipovich knows how, using some minimal means in terms of composition and plasticity, to place the sitters within the space, to co-ordinate (or dis-coordinate) them in relation to each other and to the viewer. The result is that life’s burdens (commonplace-everyday and global-existential, intensified by the age difference) are visualized practically in a direct form – as a burden, as a load.