Monday’s Muse: Kon Trubkovich

“I imagined that everything happened in a leap second in this missing measure of time—a sort of phantom, fairy-tale kind of place,” says Moscow-born, New York-based artist Kon Trubkovich.

“By taking an image of my mom from the same age as I am now and dividing it into many frames, I create an emotional space immediately,” explains Trubkovich. “I wanted to strip everything of metaphor and go to a very primal state. There’s not a lot of distance between myself and the work—I don’t need it anymore.”

“I feel a little bit like Woody Allen in Annie Hall when he goes out to LA, and he’s like this nebbish-y Jewish guy that’s constantly obsessed with his mother,” says Trubkovich. “At the beginning, I was thinking to myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ There seemed to be a kind of dissonance. But now, I’ve embrace it, and I think it’s kind of amazing.”

Quotes taken from Interview Magazine.

Raised in Moscow until the age of 11, Kon Trubkovich explores themes of confinement, rebellion, and autonomy in paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures based on still images from videos.

Using footage from the Attica Prison Riots, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Russian island of Sakhalin, and numerous other clips found on the internet, Trubkovich draws parallels between the artist’s studio and the prison as locations of cyclical rebellion and containment. Isolated fragments from his source footage, including interference and distortion, become the basis for his drawings and paintings.

It was just a matter of time before modern artists would be drawing from technology for inspiration.