FATIGUE // SCULPTURE SERIES
This image has been in my head through years of my corporate journey - a parallel reality of my private life-long artistic practice. Wherever I go, I am always the office clown; saddest people are the best entertainers. All the hell inside me was translated as a "morbid humour" and funny weirdness. People never understood me in those offices, but they always loved me with maybe a few exceptions.
This is a recurring theme for me, I portrayed this very lady lying in a forest with the contents of her of her polluted brain pouring our from her head or her mouth. I always saw her alone in a forest: she run away for a short break, because no matter how hard she wants to stay, she won't make it, she's too weak, too neurotic, too damaged by the city.
In 2024, when I was finally working at a place I didn't want to run away from (it's the Institute for Contemporary Art Yerevan, which I am a former student of) I opened the Shit Museum in one of the Institute's 4 toilets. For that exhibition my friend Mary created a plasticine copy of me sitting on a roll of toilet paper which is on my desk after the Shit Museum closed. I think it's that tiny figurine that inspired me to sculpt stuff at work, although I've been doing stuff with clay since 2005. Plasticine didn't work for me, too sticky and rigid. I went for air dough instead, which turned to be my perfect medium.
Process
FATIGUE is made of three sculptures, each trying to process the unbearable repetitiveness and predictability of my life as an artist and an office creature. One is the inevitable reproduction of myself in everything I do: no matter how hard I try it's always me and about me. There are lucky ones who can take from and give back to the outside world. Mine is always the opposite. I always admired people's ability to actually take artists seriously and spend time exploring their neuroses. It's probably because art makes it all fun to look at. If I go to the Republic Square and shout my real pain out, people will call the police. But then I humour-coat my melancholy and existential dread, and suddenly people love it. They enjoy my dry depression jokes at staff meetings and they like my instgram posts. And then I come home and drop the faux skin and faux smile, and all is left of me is this faceless cloud that has no color, no scent, and no flavor.
The Exhibition
It was at NPAK. I just remember my original idea to make the one with the moss life-size and somehow went for a smaller one. Scale is everything you know... I struggled a little while composing the caption. How do you tell people you're deadly tired of yourself without being annoying? People hate self-deprecation, but we all get tired of the set of facts and the outdated story that follows us no matter how hard we work and how much we change. For a lot of people we are still associated with our workplace from a hundred years ago, for others with a specific circle of people or exes that turned into ashes back in early 2000s.
A person is trapped within their narrative — a collection of random rumours everyone heard about them, the data the internet keeps of them, safe and forever. This narrative is like a brief Wikipedia summary of someone unremarkable yet somehow worth mentioning.
