Life on Earth
The Life on Earth series reflects the Artist’s ruminations on our everyday earthly life and cosmic reality. Ms. Fedorova explores its wide-ranging themes from a sociohistorical perspective, offering some profound insights.
The initial creative impulse for the COSMODREAMS project was sparked by the recent wave of international space exploration programmes. Witnessing the 21st-century race of the leading space-faring nations to the Moon and Mars with a view to their future colonisation and development, the Artist dedicated her first series to the celebration of patriotism. Next came the paintings that would later comprise the Life on Earth series. Here, the Artist turns her thoughts to the future, speculating just how the ever more present and rapidly proliferating technology might affect the life on our planet.
Ms. Marina Fedorova raises the issues of human lifestyle and survival of all life forms on Earth in response to the space race. She tries to imagine the future life of those who will go on living on their home planet and how their minds would be altered by the universally present competition for dominance in the outer space. The futuristic mood gradually emerging in the series was set by the multiple allusions to literary works and films that both inspired the Artist and directed her in her inner quest. Essentially metaphysical and philosophic, the series is at the same time dreamy and even somewhat naïve – a peculiar combination that would later be present throughout the entire project.
The choice of cool hues and light backgrounds symbolises sterility of space: the Artist seems to question the long-term benefits of technological progress. The paintings of this series seem to impart a feeling of detachment and loneliness, even a certain despondency looming over the human soul. Anxious to fulfil their deep-rooted inner needs, the characters of Ms. Fedorova’s artworks don VR headsets instead of rose-coloured glasses, escaping from the real world into a virtual reality (as in VR Headset).
The painting titled Time is centred around a large circle reminiscent of a spacecraft window. In addition to the title, the temporal subject matter becomes evident from the scarlet numerals displayed in the middle of the circle, turning it into a kind of a huge digital clock face. The female character stares at this porthole-cum-clock with a detached air. A mood of exhausted aloofness, sadness, even despair dominates the picture, reminding us that the passage of time is irreversible and beyond our control. By containing the digits within the perfect geometric shape of a circle, the Artist emphasises the cyclical nature of things. The eye does not immediately recognise the two red lines for what they are – red curtains decorating the interior. These vertical scarlet stripes fit perfectly into the painting’s composition, not only providing a colourful accent, but epitomising the desire to delimit time, to prevent it from flowing freely, to make it manageable and controllable.
The picture’s imagery and structure are evocative of a scene from Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. This science fiction drama, based loosely on the eponymous novel by Stanisław Lem, deals with the very same issues that Ms. Marina Fedorova addresses. Among them are the ethical norms of human existence, the ultimate outcome of human pursuits, and the ability to live under stressful conditions. The novel also references psychoanalysis and the subconscious, examines various aspects of human trauma, probes into the subject of non-human intelligence and its ability to influence the space and time metrics. Highly resonant with the Artist are also the themes of reconnecting with one’s own self while spending the time in complete isolation.
The Conversation appeared in 2019, five years after the release of the British sci-fi thriller Ex Machina directed by Alex Garland. Painted against the pure white background that symbolises an utterly neutral, lifeless space are two figures staring at each other. This image was inspired by the first encounter between a man and a robot as shown in the film. This episode is revisited to address the major issue of humans interacting with artificial intelligence and the latter’s capability to not only process the incoming information but to truly sense its meaning and have genuine feelings. Today this contentious subject is trending across newsfeeds, thanks to the exponential development of generative AI and major improvements in the mathematical algorithms and software technologies based on the study of the human brain biology and the functioning of neural connections.
The female character in this picture was painted from life. Ms. Fedorova intentionally contracted a real model to pose for her on this instance. Squinting a little, the girl intently scrutinises the face of the android standing in front of her. The robot is slightly taller than his human counterpart, perhaps indicating the perceived supremacy and sophistication of the artificial intelligence. Such placement of figures can be interpreted as a reference to the Artist’s favourite books by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, as well as the problems he voiced in his speech delivered at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention in 1972. The speech that later became known as The Android and the Human examined the psychology of humanity as seen through the lens of technology. Ms. Marina Fedorova depicts exactly this point of the first encounter between the robot and the human being, at which it is yet unclear who studies whom: is it the android scanning the girl, or is it the girl observing him closely in an attempt to discover an inner self, a soul, a feeling – anything to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate and artificial?
Aleksandra Danilovskikh
Art Historian, Art Expert