3 minute read
FLEETING MOMENTS
An interview with artist Rossitza Todorova
by Kelly Gesick
Rossitza Todorova was born in Bulgaria. She migrated to the United States as a child and grew up in Reno, Nevada. She is a well practiced artist (she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2005 and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Arizona State University in 2013 and is a tenure track Studio Art instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College) with pieces in the permanent collections of the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, Arizona, the Tucson Museum of Art in Tucson, Arizona, the University of Arizona Art Museum in Tucson, Arizona, the Painting and Sculpture Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, and numerous private collections. Her work as an artist focuses on a sense of place and the environment that surrounds her. Influenced by physical locality - living and travel, visiting places, moving from place to place and color and infrastructure of a location her work creates a conversation between these landscapes and remembered experiences. As she has moved her work has changed. Living in Nevada her work is different than when she lived in Arizona. The biggest difference is when she come back to Nevada. In Reno she is never more than 15 minutes away from being immersed in the wild and as a result her pieces have become much more naturalist. It was a lot harder to get into nature from Pheonix–there her work focused more deeply on built environments. Where she is has a big impact on what she creates. She’s very aware of her sense of place and the subtle changes of color– like the way the light in the northern and western part of the United States makes the shadows appear more blue and the in Southern part the light is orange and makes the shadows purple. She hopes her work shows how a landscape is a representation of time and it can represent past, present and future and a way for us to remember things that have happened historically or a personal memory–ike the first trip you took to Tahoe or the time you got deeply lost in a new city. "We bring all of our memories with us to the places we go and experience. When we enter a
The Start of Dawn | Acrylic, silver leaf on linen, 2020, 30” x 40”
Silver on the Lake | Acrylic, silver leaf on linen, 2021, 24” x 40”
Desert Path | Acrylic, silver leaf on linen, 2020, 24” x 30”
natural landscape we can unplug and see the future through vistas and where you are going next. Our experiences influence our interaction and presence within that space and our experiences interrupt and interact with the landscape in fleeting ways." says Todorova. But the natural landscape is much more permanent than our individual experiences. She thinks about the imagery in her work as temporary memorial (personal within a place not a monument) and the words we use to describe what we memorialize. In Bulgarian, the word for a monument is pametnik (паметник). The words meaning is associated with long-term memory. There are these brutalist monuments built in former Yugoslavia during Tito's regime, they are called spomeniks (споменӣк). "We have the same word in Bulgarian, but it means short-term memory. It made me think about what we memorialize. I keep thinking of how I could memorialize small personal experiences, moments that are fleeting," she remarks wanting to explore what it means to memorialize in the short term versus the long term. How do we capture those fleeting moments, memories and experiences for ourselves.
You can find Rossitza's work on display at the Reno Tahoe Airport gallery through February 2022 or explore her work online at rossitza.art.
