Andrew Polushkin | Dark Days

The works of Russian photographer and artist Andrew Polushkin combine digital technologies and traditional techniques of analogue printing. In his work Dark Days, he creates photographic polyptychs of distorted images - a modern interpretation of the historic and classical style. Polushkin creates an atmosphere of oppression, a viewing of the world through a muddy lens.

The Dark Days Themselves

Polushkin’s images present the subjects as faceless and tiny, the few images that show the subject hide facial features. The subjects are hidden by their own movements, objects and Polushkin’s digital tamperings. This is a world where the individual is little more than a object, where they are seen and not understood, where the human is expunged from humanity. The polyptychs frequently focus on the height of objects, typically on the great difference between a building and the individuals. Polushkin presents his images of emotional breaking and death in a typically Russian and sardonic tone- an acceptance of the end with a toothy smirk. Dark Days has a tendency towards showing disparity particular to society - beauty to ugly, built to broken, movement to stillness. These images of Polushkin are the capturings of bleakness, of an ineffectual fight for survival that merely prolongs the inevitable, the Dark Days.

The Russian Interpretation of Gothic Atmosphere

The lugubrious nature of Dark Days builds from an atmosphere both Gothic and austere. Polushkin pushes this image in a wholly Russian direction of acceptance through his impressionistic distortions. He creates a lacerating world of lonely monotony. His subjects each become an Icarus, falling towards an empty landscape, waiting for the eventual catastrophe. Polushkin creates a cadaverous other world inhabited by those that live only from breath to breath, those that belong to the catacombs of the mind. Dark Days is a nightmarish labyrinth where nameless shadows search for meaning to their existence.