Currents I & II

Stanislav Marmysh

Interview by C. VanWinkle

June 23, 2022

So tell me about the piece that you responded to. Can you describe it for me?

The sounds that I got from it were almost celestial and it reminded me of sun sonification, the sound of the sun. Some physicists used the sun’s natural vibrations to make an audible recording of its “song,” which was a lot of whooshing sounds. This was a little like that. It reminded me of celestial movements, energy, all this hoochie-coochie witchy woo-woo stuff, right? And it sounded nice! So I tied that into my more recent work with old photos of my mom and grandmother.

There was also a sound in the piece like chimes or bells, which eventually led me to think about the way light is refracted by glass. In some of the earlier versions of my artwork, I layed various glass items on top of cyanotype-sensitized papers, along with the classic ferns and leaves. I had varying levels of success, technically, but nothing I tried at first really came out that interesting. I was still into the concept of the glass, though. I was inspired by photograms of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s. The way the underlying marbled paper slightly distorted the faces was a nice discovery, though, so I leaned into that.

I see a lot of techniques here. Can you walk me through your process?

I started with Suminagashi, this Japanese paper marbling technique. Then I prepared the paper with cyanotype chemicals, making intermittent stripes going across. I layed glass objects at first, but those didn't come out great, so I used solid objects like leaves and such from around my backyard. I printed out onto transparencies images of my mom’s old ID photos from the Soviet Union. I used these along with more cyanotype to fill in the spaces between the stripes from the earlier prints. After some iterations and experiments, I made the final two images. I had originally planned to print out two pictures of my grandmother as well and actually mix up their faces between the two of them, but I ran out of the proper transparencies and only had two good printouts of my mom. And none of those leaves and stuff, all that experimentation, ended up in the final pieces! But it helped get me there. It was really more about the interplay between the faces. I was really trying to hone in on this idea.

Something I've been working on as an artist is exploring the relationship between going in with a plan and just fucking around and finding out.

This was a combo of both of them. I had this idea of using images of my grandmother and my mother, related to my previous work, and I thought, “Okay, I'll do this.” But just by chance, I ran out of what I had to print on, and I thought, “Oh well, I can work with that.” I could still basically tear up those printouts, because it felt like pieces of paper that were torn out and put together, without having to actually tear it up. It was fun.

How did you get started with Suminagashi? Was that something you learned in school?

I think I probably did some at the Museum School. I did some bookmaking when I was doing my undergrad, so I think I learned it there, but I didn't really do it a whole lot. But then later I was doing a lot of mindfulness-centered stuff and I relearned it. It's easy once you start doing it. It's one of those things that anyone can do once you learn the basics. It’s a tray of just plain water, and I have two little cups next to it. One has the ink, the other the watered-down soap. Using two brushes, one for each cup, I dip them in the cups and then, alternating between ink and soapy water, I touch the tips of the brushes to the water's surface. Capillary action from the brushes either spreads out the ink or pushes the ink around. Anyone can do it. It's relaxing.

What’s got you so interested in working with images of your mom and grandmother?

All that maternal sort of energy, your parental influences, you know. That’s how I was thinking of the paper marbling. If I was doing just one, it was like one person growing. I might do another, and then there’s also the interaction between those two people. And then the way the water interacts and the world itself moving everything around. It’s about the way that the world interacts with us. Do you know Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory?

I don't.

You should totally look into Bronfenbrenner. He's crazy! Really cool. It basically says that, starting in childhood, who we are is not only dependent on our own self-image, but it’s also influenced by systems bigger than ourselves, such as government and culture, or even family and friends. It comes down to what choices are being made for us when we're born. What are the different paths that we can take? Between survival and what we're born into nowadays, what are the actual personal choices that we can make that could make us different people?

I think about that sometimes. For the most part, babies are pretty much identical, and then depending on life circumstances and personal choices, they go off in all these different directions through their lives.

The choices laid out before us are different depending on the karmic currents we’re dropped into. How much of what we are is defined by the flow we’re going with or our desperation to swim against it? How much of a choice do we have at the end of the day? In the US, terms like “freedom” and “liberty” are used when describing national pride, yet we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Often, a conviction will follow people after they’re released, limiting their options for work and housing. Actually, some of my earlier iterations reminded me a bit of prison bars before I thickened up the brush width. This association also connects to immigration in this country. By being the "right kind" of immigrant, meaning white, by coming in the "right way,” being sponsored by family that already lived here and staying past the expiration of our work visa, my family faced minimal resistance to our immigration from the Soviet Union in the late eighties. It was just years of soul-grinding bureaucracy and repeated sexism against my mother once my parents divorced. But in our culture, the mental association of immigrants to criminals is thriving.

This really started off in one of my graduate classes. One of my professors had this assignment called “My Immigration Story.” I actually never knew a lot of the really fine connections. I made all those connections by doing this assignment and asking my mom. The crazy thing is she doesn't remember a lot of it. She’ll look through the pictures and say, “I don't know!” She's forgotten a lot of her earlier life since moving to the US. This is a thing with a lot of immigrants; their memory is affected. They take this traumatic event and force it out of their mind.

I think it’s so interesting that you used photos from an ID that, in a sense, isn’t her identity anymore. They’re photos of a different person. And we joke about ID photos automatically being bad or unflattering, yet you can use it to make this work of art.

Using these photos of my mom allowed me to picture the different possible timelines she had ahead of her, to think of the different forces acting upon her at the time, to wonder how many of them she chose to be a mother. What currents affected her choices so much that they would dictate her life story?

I'm teaching a summer art program for middle school students. One of the things that we're going to do is the paper marbling thing and I’m framing it so that it's really about mindfulness. A lot of the work that I’m doing is still about that mindfulness. It’s taking that moment, making a picture of: Where are you? Where are we right now? What are the choices we have between us? What are the forces acting upon us right now? What can we see?

So this snapshot of my mom is a snapshot of her choices at that moment in time. Those images are of her in the Soviet Union, but you don't necessarily see that. Because we're in the US right now and this is where I'm making this work, I see a young, early-nineties, single mother. And the way that it's disjointed doesn't necessarily make it look like two different people. It looks like there's something disjointed about this one person. It becomes very personal because, while it is about my mom, it's also about this grander scheme of choices, especially now with Roe v. Wade overturned. Holy fucking shit, the choices that motherhood brings to you! That makes a profound impact on someone's life.

What’s your advice for somebody else approaching this project?

Just go with the flow. At first, I thought it would be something that would be very Isolated from my work. I thought I'd listen to or see this work, whatever it is, and respond to it in this vacuum. And it ended up not being possible to do that. What I was already ensconced in ended up being not a diversion but a happy detour. “Oh, I didn't see this pathway beforehand,” you know? Here I have this other constriction. How is what I already have momentum in being affected by it? And that echoes the marbling, the way the water and everything is just… moving.

Going with the flow.

Going with the flow.

Call Number: C73MU | C76VA.maCu

Stanislav Marmysh is a Boston-based and Soviet-born multidisciplinary artist with a scavenger's mindset. Much of his artwork combines disparate elements for surreal effects, searching for meaning in distortion. As a creator who has never felt truly American or truly Russian, his art is charged with valences of alienation and polarization.