Valeriya Gayevskaya BFA Intermedia Thesis Fall 2017

Abstract

How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All is an installation composed of a Soviet bus stop, print, video and sound to show the way that someone with an immigrant identity lives in and experiences liminal space between their birth country and the one they immigrated to. Immigrant children live in a space between two worlds: a gap that cannot be closed. We are forced to make decisions on how we interact and move in between these spaces. It is a survival skill: learning to over analyze a situation to make sure you do not say the wrong thing or make the wrong move. Some may choose one identity over the other, to show parts and pieces of each, others to completely try to disregard both and form a new identity. No matter how hard we try, neither of our homeland identities and the identity of the place where we grew up could be separated. Alluding to a space where travel occurs I constructed a Soviet bus stop focusing on a physical space between two worlds. As strange as standing in a doorway, the bus stop is a waiting space between two destinations. Inside and out, it is affected by the environment and the people that pass through it; the weathering of the material it is built out of, signage plastered on as advertisements, and the overall use by people all play a part in building character and a history within the space. By bringing a space from the Soviet era into an American one, a clash is created in the contrast between the two. Creating confusion in a viewer by limiting access using layers of language and imagery, the viewer too can feel like they are in a space between two worlds.