The Artist’s Studio explores a territory between performance and sculpture by using the human body as a medium in relation to space and time. A sculptor Melissa Vipritskaya Topal uses a nude male body as a canvas to shape a sculpture using pink threads, blue paint and white paper. As the artist works on her oeuvre, the muse slowly moves, assuming different poses. A photographer, Katya Ilina, captures this transformation process in the photos. All three of them, artists and a muse, are documented by a static eye of a video camera. The resulting video artwork is an insider look at an artistic process with social dynamics very different from the ones visitors could observe in the “painter’s studio” of Gustave Courbet back in the 19th century, as depicted in his painting of the same name. ‘Male gaze’ is replaced by ‘female gaze’: the muse is now male, and artists - are female. It is up to the viewers to decide what they think about these relationships.
