Anastasia Jermolaewa
I Feel Normal
A constant state of surviving.
Bozeman, 2022
In Russian, whenever somebody asks you how you are doing, you never say good but always just normal. It implies a constant state of surviving.
You never say good — always just normal.This show is about home, belonging, immigration and time standing still, or being stuck; along with my personal approach to my immigration journey as a first-generation Russian-Ukrainian immigrant to Vienna, Austria, now living in Bozeman, learning about heritage through pop culture and literature.
Installation views
Installations of home, and the distance from it.
Anastasia Jermolaewa is a first-generation Russian-Ukrainian immigrant to Vienna, Austria, now living in Bozeman. Her installations translate the textures of immigrant domestic life — a grandmother's slippers, sunflower-seed husks on the carpet, a staircase to a second story that isn't there — into spatial meditations on home, belonging, and time standing still.
In I Feel Normal, Ilf and Petrov's Soviet travelogue One-Storied America becomes a recurring touchstone: for a very long time it was one of the only sources of information about the United States available in the Soviet world. The artist would argue that Montana — which the authors never reached — is as American as it gets.