Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
– Honoré de Balzac
I met Jenya Skubina @jenny_cycles on the online art course in Winter 2021, and after some time I came across her maps of Amsterdam, NYC & Moscow.
After a year of pandemic and lockdown in the country, seeing those maps brought back memories. I had been to Moscow many times, I had long wanted to visit Amsterdam and the Netherlands, and I had precious memories of going to New York and seeing all those people walking their dogs, I missed my friends there. With Jenya's maps I plunged into my imagination and memories.
The pandemic ripped us out of our normal way of life, out of our ability to travel the world easily, to meet people in person.
Life on Jenya's maps is booming. They are rich in detail and characters, immersed in a dynamic urban environment. Reflecting the time of the pandemic, I've taken one element from each map and isolated it, placing it in weightlessness, in an isolation bubble. Cut off from their environment, they are left to face themselves.
The project consists of 3 art objects that combine stained glass in the classic Tiffany technique with modern plexiglass.
AMSTERDAM
`A black house`
Shortly before a pandemic happened, I'd started following a pair of bloggers from Amsterdam by chance. One of them @art_city_amsterdam moved there with her family when she was 11 years ago. She is a teacher in a primary school and an art specialist. Another woman @natalia.remish moved there around six years ago from Russia, and she is a writer of books for kids and a popularizer of psychology although she always points out that she is not a psychologist.
Both of them show through their blogs how society works from kids to grow-ups in the Netherlands. And I fell in love with many of their principles. Since then I have wanted badly to visit this city and country and wish to live there for some time.
What else could I grab from that map other than a girl with the dog?
The last time when I was in the city in 2019, I lived at my friend's not far from Prospect Park in Brooklyn and spent lots of time there watching people walking their adorable dogs or dog walkers who were dealing with about a dozen of them at once - that's a real case, I am not kidding. Dogs were so happy there - fetching balls, swimming in the pond, playing with each other. It seemed to me that this city LOVES the dogs.
