Dmitry Trashkov - 'Ghost Heaven'
The Top Floor, 7th–24th April 2010
Dmitry Trashkov studied towards a BFA at the University of Canterbury 2006-09, majoring in Graphic Design. During his final year of study, Trashkov's research project addressed fairy tales and illustration. This work resulted in the creation of a picture book, The Smart Snapper, comprising sixteen illustrations executed in watercolours, colour pencils and chalk. The Smart Snapper is a classic cautionary tale in which the protagonist plays it safe by withdrawing from life, and thus, sadly, reaches the end of his days without ever having truly lived. Moreover, Trashkov's picture book contains an incipient political message in that its main character is menaced by authoritarian forces in the form of a police-uniformed shark, and on his deathbed receives a 'Quiet Life' medal from the Sea Queen.In his current COCA exhibition, Trashkov presents a body of work illustrating C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. The premise of Lewis' book is that each of us battles with an internal malevolence or personal demon that seeks to subvert our souls and deliver them to the forces of darkness personified in the idea of Satan. Each of the thirty one letters in Lewis' book outlines a different track or tactic by which this spiritual subversion is attempted. Thus, in the 'First Letter,' Uncle Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood that immersion in banal, quotidian life is one such strategy employed by the forces of evil to distract us from reflecting on Divinity and the Afterlife. Everyday, material existence thus tends to supplant or obscure the 'good' or 'true' reality that derives from the realm of the spirit. Trashkov finds great potential for artistic exploration in Lewis' suggestion that life, as we experience it, is a spiritual struggle between opposed realities. The artist's response to The Screwtape Letters takes the form of thirty one framed, A2 colour drawings, which seek to translate, in visual terms, the mystical, philosophical and surreal potentials in Lewis' writing.