Oxytocin

Oxytocin / Exposition view
Until We Fade
2019
Ice, water, neon, stainless steel

Until We Fade
2019
Ice, water, neon, stainless steel
240x200x60 cm

Oxytocin / Exposition view
Until We Fade
2019
Ice, water, neon, stainless steel

Milk in my Tears
2019
Frozen milk, aluminum wire, light, black sand
Dimensions variable

Milk in my Tears
2019
Frozen milk, aluminum wire
Dimensions variable

As the Mind it Changes
2019
Photographs, aluminum frames
120x82 cm

280 days
2019
Brain coral, stone, rose buds
142x14 cm

Corporeal mineralogy series
2019
Coral, neon
35x22x15 cm

How we live in each other
2019
Plaster cast, fabric, earth, plant
120x63 cm

Eclipse
2018
HD video, 9m 36sec

Until We Fade
2019
Ice, water, neon, stainless steel
240x200x60 cm

Osnova gallery, Moscow

«Winzavod» Center for Contemporary Arts

September, 10 – October, 13 2019

Osnova Gallery presents «Oxytocin» exhibition by Margo Trushina – project that rethinks human's place in the environment from the perspective of ecological discourse and the philosophy of posthumanism. Installation and objects created over the past year represent personal experience of the artist’s motherhood and suggest the viewer a critical look at the human-nature and its subsequent evolution in conditions of a technogenic future perspective. In Margo Trushina’s works breast milk is mixed with melting glaciers, and non-organic materials continue living tissue of vegetable world, forming hybrid phenomena – ecosystems. “Until we fade” installation, transforming in time, represents a symbolic iceberg melting in gallery space and neon red “cardiogram” reproduces the graph of global warming over the past 100 years.

“Oxytocin” or “love hormone” is an important link between human beings and nature world, it is produced by the hypothalamus and naturally affects many areas of body and brain. Oxytocin production is stimulated during sex, childbirth and breastfeeding. Oxytocin, the hormone responsible for the sense of connection and empathy, plays a central role in all types of social connections. Recent studies in neuroscience have shown that this hormone is also produced when a person meets nature. It turned out that phenomena such as the solar eclipse, and other natural phenomena, could also become a catalyst for a sense of deep connection and complicity.

In the "Oxytocin" project, Margo Trushina’s works planetary and human “bodies” are all caught up in one another’s currents - as breast milk cannot be disentangled from Arctic currents, or amniotic fluids from increasingly toxic oceans. In the exhibition space milk is dripping from sculpted frozen breasts, glacier is melting in an aquarium; plants are growing from the live cast of a pregnant body; corals are growing from neon tubes sculptures, forming hybrid ecosystems.; we are all here autobiographical trace fossils entangled in the mythology of corporeal mineralogy.

Turning to the philosophy of posthumanism, the ideas of Donna Harraway and Rosie Braidotti on the equality of Man, Nature and Society as three jointly evolving entities, as well as developing Timothy Morton's thesis about "ecology without nature" and a world where living and non-living objects are woven into social, political and sensual relationships, Margo Trushina creates her own space where she invites the viewer to think about both the “nature” of man and our attitude to “nature”. The post-man today exists in the "anthropocene" era. This concept, imported from geology into philosophy and designating the period of the irreversible human influence on the Earth’s ecosystem, is understood not only as a definition of a new era in the existence of space, but also as an aesthetic and sensual phenomenon, “the experience of living in depleted and toxic world,” which artists introduce into their arsenal of discourse and practice.

The environmental crisis prompted scientists, philosophers, artists to revise relationship between nature and culture, man and objects. Joint survival on the planet, in addition to scientific research, eco-activism and the practice of conscious consumption, requires new art, work of imagination, creation of new imagery and plastics.