TATIANA SKY
Tatiana Sky is a visual artist based in Chicago who primarily makes sculpture. Working with paper mache, plaster and cast metal, their sculptures interrogate our relationship with natural environments. Their work focuses on decorative manipulations of landscape and is informed by various forms of embellishment such as human adornment, architectural details and garden spaces. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020.
‘garden’ is defined here as: an enclosed space designed for deep sentiments to be shared and for things to grow.
The work invites you into an enchanted garden space that collapses the landscape onto a hyper-feminine body. The garden creates a space to reconcile with the awkwardness of femininity in it's shifting, wobbling, abstracted form. The person represented in this work exists in flux, reminiscent of an internal puberty being excavated. It is both blushing coyly and repulsing the viewer. Instead of rendering the figure, Tatiana Sky celebrates the clumsiness of growing by presenting a body as a flower in a melted, blobby form. These cartoonish flowers bloom out of the ground and simultaneously droop back towards it. They appear to wilt and fail at assimilating into this new reality which they are alien to.
This garden is exists as a dream space to subvert the patriarchal desire to conquer nature and instead urges it’s participants to imagine a fantasy place outside of reality.