Irina Drozd. Collector Automatic translate

I found a beetle in the grass - A
black beetle, brilliant,
For the collection of my
Most suitable.

My bug breaks out,
Jumps, chirps.
He
doesn’t want to get into my collection.

The poem in the painting "Beetle" by Ilya Kabakov.

What is collecting today? This is no longer an attempt to preserve the moment of history, expressing it through ordered objects, as Walter Benjamin believed, and not even representing himself outside through real objects: collecting in digital and virtual spaces is becoming more and more active. What remains of collecting? A conscious choice of this or that phenomenon, adding it to the experience of your living, “an attempt to create an acceptable private universe” (Kevin M. Moist, David Banash “Modern collecting: objects, practices and the fate of things”). Collecting today is the conscious construction of one’s own individuality through elements of various levels. You can collect everything: objects, phantoms of the virtual world, experience, emotions, feelings.In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Sacrifice,” one of the heroes calls himself a “collector of events.” Ilya Kabakov writes explanations for his painting “The Beetle”: “All living things are divided into those who collect the collections and those who serve as the subject of this collectible.”

In her project, Irina Drozd shows young heroines, they are collectors who are just learning this occupation. They lure “exhibits” into their collection, feed, examine and create houses for them - cells where they must exist. The heroines are afraid of their collection, and love, and cherish, and discuss. What is the collection itself? “Monsters”, as the artist herself calls them, on the one hand, seem to us absolutely fantasy. On the other hand, they desperately resemble the very bugs and spiders that we put in matchboxes in childhood, studied and tormented in order to gain experience in interacting with the outside world, and learn to express ourselves outside with the help of the “other”. This is “different” and does not expect to find itself in such a situation, it behaves scared, and sometimes brazenly. What is it?

Little collectors Irina Drozd - collectors of nothing more than their own emotions, which the artist embodies in unknown creatures. These emotions, so unusual in childhood, are tamed by us, put into boxes, conceptualized and left to live in our children’s room, where we, studying and taming our own feelings, become ourselves, and the room, in turn, remains to live in us, together with monsters, boxes and images of friends. It is this room that the artist reconstructs, embodying with the help of sculptures and paintings, our very first collection, which is created from interaction with the world. This collection will remain with us for life, and no one knows where and which box will unexpectedly open. Perhaps it was in such a room, with all our monsters, that we ended up due to recent events in the world.

Marina Alvitre