ADAA's The Art Show 2022: Vera Iliatova, Sarah Peters, Tim Wilson

Nathalie Karg Gallery would be thrilled to be selected as an exhibitor at the ADAA’s 60th anniversary edition of The Art Show with a presentation of new paintings by Vera Iliatova and Tim Wilson and brand new sculptures by Sarah Peters. Delving into the elusive nature of temporal belonging, our booth would exhibit artwork that explicitly draws from the past to produce a palpable effect of liminality underneath more immediately evident aesthetic allure. In this light, the presentation would serve as a diverse exploration of the ways that these artists fuse facets of history – on the global, cultural, and personal levels – with the present moment.

Simply put, Sarah Peters’ sculptures feel as though they were created during another era, teleported by coincidence or chance from their world to ours. Drawing from varied iconographic influences, Peters’ works merge the ancient and the contemporary by introducing modernized modifications to idols modeled after those from ancient societies and mythologies, like the Greco-Roman and Egyptian empires. A bust, for example, might contain smooth, eyeless sockets that penetrate cavernously into its head, whose surface is decorated by undulating lines of hair so meticulously styled it seems impossible they have been created by a human hand. Through these objects, Peters cultivates an avant-garde, sensualized interpretation of classic archetypes. The brand new works, finished in silver nitrate patina and set atop custom-made oak pedestals, will carry the other-worldly, simultaneously sleek and strange charge of past and present, tradition and modernity.

Paintings by Tim Wilson and Vera Iliatova will surround Peters’ sculptures. Wilson’s modestly sized works, all oil on paper mounted on linen stretched panels, depict uninhabited but marvelously furnished interiors. Sundry mirrors wait for us to appear in them; bottles of recherché fragrances demand to be worn; one might even imagine a Peters bronze luxuriantly donning a mantelpiece. These interiors are sourced from the backdrops of film and television shows of the 70s and 80s: Wilson scans the outer edges of his TV screen looking, “for some sort of surprise,” and often misses the narrative arc of the storyline completely. When he seizes on a particular image, he pauses to capture it, then alters and enhances the still. The resulting paintings, though bolstered by sumptuous colors and richly laden oils, maintain a pointed sense of fleetingness. Each snapshot feels suspended right in a moment before/after an important action took/will take place, transmitting a unique temporal aura that mimics the blurriness of memory.

Vera Iliatova’s larger paintings will serve as the focal point of the booth. Iliatova masterfully composes female figures in landscape, infusing each painting with its own implied melodrama. The adolescent atmosphere that permeates her scenes no doubt stems from the artist’s teenage years, when she relocated from Soviet Russia to the United States. As Iliatova continues to navigate this ongoing journey, the girls she depicts are embroiled in their own similar struggle, often casting forlorn downward glances, running to an off-canvas destination, or aimlessly clustered together within an oppressive atmosphere of grayness. Multi-faceted in nature, one can imagine them as representations of the artist growing up or of the woman she imagines she might have become had she stayed in Russia, issuing a reminder that what’s past is inevitably present in the constant negotiations of our psyche.

Together, the proposed artists traverse these thematic motifs within their own respective microcosms of historical inspiration. Whereas Peters’ sculptures take a wider lens in perspective, siphoning aesthetic and political themes from ancient society, Wilson and Iliatova take a more acute approach, the former finding inspiration in the pop culture of his youth and the latter doing so from emotional memory. Maintaining a seductive charge through their exquisitely rendered surfaces, the works stop short of visual resolution in favor of ephemerality, invoking the necessary human practice of mediating the past’s role in the present moment and illuminating finitude as a false notion.