Alisa Aistova

Alisa Aistova

Russian, lives and works between London, Moscow and San Francisco

Alisa considers her work an act of arrangement, a vehicle to investigate the psyche, human boundaries, and transitional states. Having researched the foundations of schizophrenia and doom as lived realities, Alisa is drawn to how they can be transmitted into art. In this piece, the flower is wilting, nearly decaying. Yet it is carefully shown for its ability to reach. In these concentrated shots that allude to the quality of life, Alisa confronts the observer’s prejudices and stigmatization of mental health illness.

There is an intimate and scaled proximity between the observer and Tryptich that follows from the arrangement. In particular, the dark values intensify our reception of the image and emit disturbing energy. Both the films Van Sent and Tarr and Czia Zhang Ke inspired Alisa to articulate the transformation and isolation that occur throughout the illness. It is revealing how Tryptich treats the flower as a sketch, or a window into the roundness of the psyche, and not as a mirror.