"THE SAME KARASS"
Participants:
Galina Bleykh, Nikolay Gavrilenko, Vladimir Mihailutza, Marina Pavlova,
Elena Serebryakova, Victoria Urman-Kuslik, Nina Florovskaya, Andrey Yuriev
Painting, drawing, photo
In the halls of the gallery

"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical
reasons…that person may be a member of your karass."
                                                             Kurt Vonnegut
 
In 1991 eight Petersburg artists united to form the creative group "Me". The same year an exhibition of the group opened in Borey, one of the first Leningrad galleries. In the beginning of 1990-ies we were all united by the spirit of freedom, in which everyone tried to grope his own way and to realize himself as an artist. We were an assembly of individualities and did not aspire to resemble each other. We did not try to develop a common artistic idea, but existed in uniform cultural space and almost all had identical education. We required audience and critics, and participants of the group played both roles for each other. We aspired to show our works, and unification of efforts facilitated this task. It is possible to say that the participants of the group in some enigmatic way managed to meet in time and space, being members of "one karass".
Since then our ways have gone apart, including the geographical aspect – some of us still live in St. Petersburg, while others have moved to Germany or Israel. But what united us once has remained unchanged - we exist in the dimension of creativity.
How time and circumstances have affected us, how we and our works have changed – is to be shown by this exhibition. In "Borey", that is where the history of group "Me" began, we are showing both our works of that period and the new works of each of the participants.