MaxArt Residency, 9 joint season with the Perm Museum of Local History, Perm, 2025.

My glossary usually features fictional characters and creatures, cryptids, for example, and generally “non-human agents.” Therapsids existed, but so long ago that they seem, in my imagination, to border on mythology. I’ve developed a kind of Permian therapsid style — I’m actualizing the diorama format, which features stylized lizards, bordering on character and ornament. The diorama is not yet complete. The reliefs, based on excavation photographs from the Perm Regional Studies Museum archive, have a slightly more serious tone, but are linked to the diorama by a sense of the intersection of three timelines, like a sculptural rupture. These timelines are the remains of therapsids carried away by an ancient river from the Permian period, excavations of the 20th century, and my contemporary art project. The graphics are connected to the excavations through history — the bones of the theropophagi were found during excavations for volkonskoite, a mineral from which paint pigments were made. I used oil and also made volkonskoite oil pastels using transparent pastel and mineral pigment, sometimes adding oil paint. Intuitive drawing and the very nature of volkonskoite — it forms as a result of the interaction of chromium-rich groundwater with organic matter (with wastewater and tree trunk fragments buried in coarse debris) — led me to images of a bodily substance deposited among plant matter. The central theme is about human fragility, empathy, and, at the same time, self-destruction, the destruction of others, and nature — humanity does not need to bring itself to its end.