5/27: FAKE CAN BE JUST AS EFFICIENT // new works by ELINA MALKIN

2011 May 23

by theacreproject

FAKE CAN BE JUST AS EFFICIENT
new works by ELINA MALKIN
Opening Reception: Friday, May 27, 6-9

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street

Untitled video, 2011, 6min. 15 sec

FAKE CAN BE JUST AS EFFICIENT
In the artist’s words:

My work explores a hazy territory between reality and fantasy, skepticism and faith. It is, in essence, about spiritual confusion, and the necessary suspension of disbelief that I feel I need to comprehend and navigate of the world. It plays with the human ability to get caught in a narrative and the beauty and purity of a naive vision that has yet to be questioned.”

“In order to greater understand this territory, my research has branched out in several directions. I’ve looked deeper into my own folklore, the fantastical stories and superstitions passed down through the tightly knit matriarchy of my mother’s family. My most current research is into spiritual pseudoscience, including Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone theory, Plastic Shamanism, or the inauthentic New Age appropriation of Native American and other rituals, and my own spiritual background, which includes practices of Judaism, Quakerism, Tibetan Buddhism, and other more occult and mystical interests encouraged by my family and studied academically through the lens of ethnography. I have been experimenting with different forms of divination as tools for personal insight, eking out gems of genuine enlightenment from illusion and abstraction. I am trying to create works that hover emotionally between a sincere desire to trust in their power and a rational view of their actual effectiveness.”

ELINA MALKIN is a Pennsylvania based artist who creates multimedia works spanning the mediums of video, photography, collage, sculpture, performance, and installation. She received her BFA in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005, and and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Her work involves the manipulation and transformation of every day objects in a search for their spiritual core.