"MONUMENTS OF OUR TIME"
photographs by YOLA MONAKHOV STOCKTON
NOVEMBER 16, 2018 - JANUARY 13, 2019
Nichols School Gallery at the Glenn and Awdry Flickinger Performing Arts Center
Reception for the Artist is on December 6 from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Monuments of Our Time is a photographic exhibition in three parts.
With Post-Photography, the artist creates recording mechanisms from cardboard boxes. Loaded with darkroom paper and perforated with pinholes, the boxes glimpse surrounding views, as they peregrinate among post offices, mail trucks, and delivery points. Authorless and automatic, the unique prints produced by this process recall early-twentieth-century Soviet Constructivism, an apex of expressive freedom and Utopian optimism in the defunct nation where the artist was born.
In another series, the artist creates a visual diary in her adopted city. As an observer sensitive to social-documentary concerns, she catalogues its vernacular voices, public avowals, personal and humorous moments, and testaments to resilience. Rendered through color film and a handheld camera, these photographs trace the crimson contours of the city’s Phoenician renewal.
Finally, weaving together oral and epic traditions for the titular series, the artist creates panoramic portraits of women alongside public monuments. The sculptural symbols of civic virtue, masculinity, and conquest take on new overtones in the presence of the contemporary flâneuse, who may be a refugee, student, or holder of an H1B visa. Equally, the artist envisions other totems of the civic landscape in monumental terms: the tender cultivation of a garden; a beautiful young woman waiting at a bus stop. The elongated aspect ratio of the B&W photographs, such as was favored in Japanese narrative painting, and their direct graphic approach, cast new monuments for a new story.
Yola Monakhov Stockton is an artist working in photography, artist books, and documentary practice. She runs the Photography program at SUNY Buffalo State, where she is Assistant Professor. The Nature of Imitation, her first monograph, was published by Schilt. Her work has recently appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker, among other publications, and resides in the collections of Fidelity Investments, George Eastman Museum, JP Morgan Chase, Nelson-Atkins Museum, and Smith College Museum of Art. She is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art in New York City. After receiving her M.F.A. from Columbia University, she served as Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith College, and currently lives in Buffalo with her family.
The show is free, open to the public and sponsored by the Colby Art Fund | For Gallery hours an details please call 716.332.6300