video/cyber art exhibition

December 19-30, 2006
Exhibition “Visionary dreams #2391-95”
by Anna Frants at
Gallery Borey. St Petersburg, Russia

Anna Frants is a New York based independent curator and multimedia artist. Her accomplishments reflect the broad range of interests she has. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she graduated from Muhina Academy of Design in 1989 with a solid classical foundation and later expanded her interests and education to include the domains of computer imaging and animation. She has participated in and curated numerous art exhibitions in United States and Russia, for number of years have been teaching media studies and animation and also published articles on art. Works can be found in KyoseinoSato Contemporary Art Museum (Japan) and in private collections.

“In her works Anna Frants lightly and funnily tells us about most serious philosophical things and avoids academic truisms and highflown epithets. With the help of interaction she draws participants of different age into her works. /…/ Anna Frants suggests that new technologies are not only entertainment, but the best mean to convey the inner world of a person with all its complexities and nuances. And in that aspect digital art is really close to painting.” from the article by Olga Horoshilova

In Borey gallery Anna Frants will present video installations: “The Window”, “Made in Ancient Greece”, “Video Graffiti” and pportraits from Staticvideo series.

STATICVIDEO
Video

The art of the portrait, an artistic representation of a person, has flourish for centuries in many cultures through a variety of fine art forms such as painting, sculpture and photography. The new mediums and technologies such as video, computer graphics and animation created new possibilities for artistic insight into conveying the nuances of a personality. The “StaticVideo” offers opportunity to capture a moment of life in complex dynamics of colors and sound.

“The Window”
Soap bubbles/ video installation

Recent technological advances faded a fine line between reality and the virtual world, like playing computer games make us forget what type of reality we are in.
But since memory works alike in both worlds, triggering randomly pictures and events we have seen and experienced, “The Window”, does not tell us a story, but rather observes and remembers the way our minds works while the soap bubbles pop away.



Made in Ancient Greece
Video sculpture. 2006


“Made in Ancient Greece” is a freestanding video sculpture that introduces unlikely, from the conservative point of view, but perfect marriage of traditional art form and moving images.

Unlike renowned Tony Oursler's puppet theatre lit by “laterna-magica” projectors- narrative does not play any role, leaving viewer to concentrate on pure visuals.

Ridiculing snobbishness of our conventional thinking, sculpture plays on principles of our vision, time that long term memory takes to pulls out cliches, and perfect proportions of the Greek pottery.

Video Graffiti

Translucent screen, video projections. 2006

Video Graffiti is ambient video work projected on the translucent video screen from multiple locations. Video material mixed on the “canvas” derived from different world locations. There is no sound accompaniment, it is only video. Like traditional painting, video painting being there to be viewed or passed over - depending on the individual viewer preference at the moment.