Girlfriends

The group Factory of Found Clothes was founded by St. Petersburg artists Olga Egorova (Tsaplya) and Natalia Pershina‑Yakimanskaya (Gluklya) in 1995. They were both interested in clothes as a projection of human existence. That same year their first joint project, the installation  Girlfriends, a poetic and symbolically rich work that explored “reality and eternity,” memory and corporeality, was shown at Gallery 21 in St. Petersburg. A reconstruction of  Girlfriends’ created by the artists at the request of Garage, is on display in open storage.

The central object of the installation is a black dress lying on the floor under glass. It becomes a metaphor for the repose of a functional object, which, having lost its role, is frozen in the eternity between life and death. Placed under glass, the dress looks like a museum piece or a child's  sekretik, a hiding place for memories of a carefree past. The relic, surrounded by artificial flowers, becomes an opposition to the girls’ white dresses soaring like angelic entities.

The vertical part of the installation is based on plastic oppositions—black and white, static and dynamic, heavy and light. In contrast there is a spatial horizontal—a row of bright vintage swimsuits reflected in a large mirror in a massive frame.

In the intersection of the material (horizontal, colored) and the sublime (vertical, monochrome) one can read not only the memory of the body, the experience of reality and liberation from it, but also the universal signs of the earthly and heavenly.