KOZYREV, Dimitri

graphite on paper

17 5/8 x 35"

It is not surprising, given his long-term association with the UCSB Art Department, that Gary Brown would collect the works of his students, and this drawing by Dimitri Kozyrev (MFA, 2000) is an excellent example of his interest in how the delicacy of line—usually the formal anchor of a work—can also construct an inherent instability in and through its enveloping space. In this case, clear-cut Euclidian geometries are subverted in favor of a more hyperbolic, ‘autopian’ topography, as if the world were viewed through the windshield of a speeding automobile, denying the spectator the comforts of a sustaining visual ground. Occasionally, we focus on a specific detail but more often than not Kozyrev deterritorializes our perception, as we are caught up in the ephemeral experience of anticipating what is yet to come, grasping the immediate moment in our peripheral vision, or recalling what we have just witnessed in our virtual memory. Kozyrev expresses this ambivalence between objective specificity and subjective incommensurability by representing the gaps in our attention as much as the concrete object or landscape per se. Thus details are sketched in—a line of trees, a rough horizon line, the receding lines of street lamps and freeway—so that topography is reduced to a series of minimalistic signifiers. Instead of a panoramic spectacle, we are made more aware of vast expanses of white space which “invades” the scene so that it is often difficult to discern the dividing line between nature and simulacrum, sky and earth, foreground and background, virtual and actual space. The result is a breakdown of linear or chronological time into overlapping shards of active memory, in which past, present and future collapse into pure becoming. Colin Gardner Professor and Chair, Art Department

2004

KOZYREV, Dimitri

United States, b. Russia, 1967

Gift of Gary H. Brown

2005.006.002