Exhibition Timofei Smirnov "The subscriber is online again"

The project includes 20 works, written in pencil on paper or canvas, sometimes with the inclusion of acrylic paints. These are mainly smartphones that differ in wallpaper. What is our life? - Smartphone! The face of a modern person for hours, minutes, years facing the phone screen. Along with this, the smartphone itself observes its owner (“Eyes of the House”), quickly recognizes its interests, its main routes of movement and even becomes an interlocutor with a voice, for example, Alice. Timofei Smirnov built his project as a dialogue between a person and his smartphone.

"My phone rang, who’s talking?" Elephant? (K. Chukovsky). Such a question a person asks a caller for the first time; otherwise, along with a call, the smartphone helpfully displays the name of the subscriber on the screen. The smartphone has expelled phone books from our lives - both pocket and thick directories. Old family albums moved to the mezzanine; they were replaced by albums in a smartphone, which is also a camera. Nostalgic, a person refers to the past tense photo on his phone, as the artist Timofey Smirnov very poetically showed in his father’s jacket, Rain without Cats and Dogs.

“A female voice on the phone - How many sweet harmonies In this voice without a body!” (N. Gumilev). Voice is optional, our fingers run around the touch screen, sending SMS messages to subscribers. For example, as Timofey Smirnov portrayed in the works “Correspondence with a Star”, “Dreams of a washstand”, “SMS - element”. T. Smirnov: “Love lives in SMS, and passionate photos only awaken emotions, which have become much easier to express not in poems and songs, but in“ emoticons ”and“ emoticons ”. Popularity is expressed in “likes”, and the smartphone collects and arranges them (Work “Like”). “I wake up on the phone, shave, brush my teeth, scrub, wash my face…” (I. Brodsky). A smartphone almost everywhere replaced a person’s watch, helping to cope with time, which is convenient. However, at the same time, he devours time irrevocably - the work of “Crane Screen”, “Chimes”. We are spinning through life along with time (the “Top”), however, we always lag behind it, because every moment of our life is already yesterday in time.

The third eye, which the various esotericists so persistently seek, exists. This is a smartphone lens! When traveling, visiting exhibitions and museums, we essentially look at the world through this “third eye” and, not hoping for our memory, select objects on the smartphone screen and then send them to the photo album of our device (see, for example, “Three Zeros” "," Moscow-Pergamon Altar "). A smartphone, like a spy, allows you to sneak a peek into someone else’s private life ("Private Life"), satisfying our curiosity and at the same time narrowing our personal space. The smartphone constantly informs its user about its status (for example, it is buggy or in power saving mode) on the screen (see “Melody in percent”, “Glitch is alive”). Phone of O. Mandelstam: “The phone in the apartment is crying - Two minutes, three, four. Silent and very angry: Ah, no one came up. “So I don’t need me at all…”?
Irina Filatova

A presentation of Timofey Smirnov’s book Photorealism in Russia. Watch and see ”, which received a grant from the Russian Science Foundation.