March 31 - May 1, 2007Opening Reception: Saturday, March 31, 7pm
Gregg Fleishman Studio with Nana Tchitchoua
3850 Main Street Culver City CA 90232
As a cultural producer, Nana creates in diverse media and technologies; she is an artist, filmmaker, independent curator, educator and impressario. Nana is a long time collaborator with her husband, Travis Wade Ivy and an initiator of the artists' exchange residency/collaborative projects: Dadabeat-i Avant-Ura! and Other Zones. She is also associated with The Tula Tea Room at The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Nana (Nanuka) Tchitchoua was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1978, to a family of mixed heritage - a Jewish mother and a Georgian Orthodox [Christian] father. Growing up through the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire; her surroundings were at once tumultuous and immutable. She was predisposed with a sense of deep connections to her ancestral past, and the fragile translucence of the present. The crumbling societal structure in Georgia forced her family to flee in the early 90s. Throughout this, she developed a personal aesthetic through painting, and later filmmaking; a spiritual collision of fragmentary epochs. After immigrating to the United States in 1992, she studied at the California Institute of the Arts, receiving a BFA in Art in 2000 and an MFA in Experimental Filmmaking in 2002. At present she produces paintings, drawings, moving images to action performance, installations, collages and prints in her Culver City studio.
Her work is a fusion of ancient archetypes, ethnographic treasures and various cultural icons, presented in an evocative arrangement that belies the modern context in which it is produced. In navigating the tenuous path of her dual cultural identity she asserts the transformative possibilities of finding beauty amid ruins, making something out of nothing - a cross-referencing of images that are fiercely nostalgic for a heroic and romantic dream world. Her imagery translates the daily tragedy of the human condition into a highly decorative and diverse transcendental victory. Nana draws inspiration from Byzantine aesthetics and her Georgian lineage with a history of four thousand years. Her cinematic interventions into painting are her personal visions of fantasy landscapes, wonderlands populated by exotic figures and mysterious structures. Nana's images are suffused with elegance and articulated by autobiography. Led by process, her most recent works reflect on utopias, poetically illustrating potential resolutions to fundamental crises confronting culture today.
Nana returns to Georgia regularly to participate in the lively contemporary art culture there. In the United States, she shows her work in exhibitions and film festivals. Highlights include TOMORROWLAND: CalArts in Moving Pictures, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 2006; Fragments from a Lovers Discourse, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, 2006; Over Here-There, The Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Stanford University 2002; and worldwide in Holland, France, China, Spain, Norway, Germany, and Russia.
Great Website: www.nanuka.com
Impressions from Rustaveli (2001): Directed by Nana Tchitchoua, Film Festival Favorite, Mythical fairytle, Educators: 16mm $500.00, VHS $75.00, Consumers: VHS $15.00, 16mm $300.00
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