Moston
- Moston
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MOSTON. © 2011 Anya Belkina.
Ideas and observations stemming from bicultural experience and the larger issues of identity, immigration, and globalization are central to Anya Belkina’s work. She fuses art with inquiry in the areas of biology, physics, and computer science. MOSTON, a 12-foot-tall suspended inflatable sculpture, embodies an internal conception of home and the cyberfusion of two geographically distant locales: Moscow and Boston. Its surface design of printed artwork and documentary footage projection explores visual and historical commonalities of the two cities, commonalities that are more easily researched, documented, and shared in the era of instant global networking. While MOSTON’s three-dimensional form references ethnically specific artifacts, the visual appeal and conceptual ingenuity of matryoshkas reach audiences beyond Russia and the Russian diaspora. A universally understood symbol of sequential creation, these toys offer a fitting framework for evoking the concentric evolution of Moscow’s and Boston’s city armatures. The implied nestedness of MOSTON is also congruent with the layered mental construct of “home,” especially as perceived by individuals with multicultural backgrounds. Belkina describes the scale of the project as essential, not only because her motherland is the largest country in the world, with an impressive record of pursuing hopeless megalomaniac ventures, but also because “there is no place like home.” [End Page 354]
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MOSTON. © 2011 Anya Belkina.
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MOSTON. © 2011 Anya Belkina. [End Page 355]
Anya Belkina Emerson College Boston, Massachusetts USA anya_belkina@emerson.edu www.anyabelkina.com
Anya Belkina is assistant professor of new media at Emerson College in Boston. Prior to joining Emerson in 2007, she held the position of assistant professor in the practice of art at Duke University. Belkina received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. In Russia, she studied at the Moscow Art College in Memory of 1905. Belkina’s work in the area of new media has been presented nationally and abroad at conventional exhibition venues, as well as in the form of large-scale site-specific installations, video projections, broadcast media, and cover art for literary journals. Her award-winning animated shorts have screened at numerous national and international venues, including SIGGRAPH, ANIMATOR, RIIFF, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and The Light Factory Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
