"Ekaterina assembles her 'Paper Herbarium' from fragments of vinyl records and the paper sleeves they came in, discovered in an abandoned house.
A herbarium by its very nature carries a commemorative charge — a modest wildflower found by chance inside a volume of Nikolai Gumilyov, a memento of some fleeting rendezvous in a run-down estate in the Vladimir province. The flowers have long since lost their bright colours and their bewitching scent; the music of the old scratched records is no longer to be played back — nothing remains but the memory. The terse, decorative motifs of Soviet mass-produced print are turned into delicate compositions of coloured-paper cuttings, faded by time as if beneath a dusty veil. And yet they serve wonderfully as a metaphor for that selectiveness of personal and cultural memory thanks to which each of us is able to arrange scattered facts into a coherent historical myth.
The regular pattern of old official forms can serve as a background for 'portraits of objects' — hand-made skullcaps. The uneven ovals of these handcrafted things fall into dissonance with the regular grid of paper printed at industrial scale. Half a century ago, the Soviet Conceptualists tried to deconstruct the power of bureaucracy by making parody of formalised official documents. Ekaterina Rozhkova simply paints over them."
Extract from Evgeny Naumov's article "We Were Playing Hide-and-Seek with Reality Behind the Wall of a Forest of Memories"
