Join us for the opening reception of Konstantin Simun's exhibition “Faces.”
Light refreshment will be served. Sergei Nirenburg, a wonderful accordionist, will also help us to celebrate.
“I see art everywhere I look. Sometimes people ask me how I work, and I say: ‘I’m just cleaning the street,’” Simun says, laughing. “But everything I pick up either is, or becomes, a work of art.”
Konstantin Simun’s monumental sculpture The Broken Ring on the shore of Lake Ladoga is well known by every resident of St. Petersburg, Russua, and around the world.
Bostonians love his work Doo-Doo, memorial to the Puppeteer Igor Fokin, installed on Harvard Square, Cambridge. Simun's works were exhibited in the Russian Museum, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, and many others, and now at TurnPark!
"As all Soviet artists who emigrated to the West at an advanced age, Konstantin Simun was forced to prove his right to his own identity. He thematicized the cultural shock inevitably experienced by an artist of his generation, formed in virtually complete isolation from the situation developing in the West.
He did not try to hide his inspiration from encounters with American culture and American objective world in particular. He totemized ready made industrial forms, appealing to the extra-normative sensuality." (from Alexander Borovsky’s article “Simun the Beginner”)
The exhibition “Faces” represents the series of masks/heads - sculptural incarnations of plastic packaging with eye-sockets and mouths open wide in a scream, cast in bronze. This traditionally noble and costly material places new accents, and enriches the objects with new symbolical and psychological values.
Sergei Nirenburg is a veteran accordion player and folk-style vocalist. Outside of the realm of music, Sergei is Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and Chair of the Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His professional passion is building artificial intelligent agents endowed with some aspects of human capabilities, such as understanding language and goal-oriented reasoning.