Sasha Rudensky left Moscow for the U.S. when she was a child, but the former Soviet Union has been the focus of her photography for close to a decade. A show of her work, “Tinsel and Blue,” opened this week at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York City, and runs until July 16. Straddling the space between documentary and staged portraits, her images are filled with isolated people, posed in spaces that radiate wealth but not warmth. The coldness of the scenes is reenforced by Rudensky’s use of the color blue, which envelopes both a boy playing pingpong in a choir robe and a woman in lingerie dancing on a table, men stripped to the waist surrounded by hookah smoke and white-haired ladies watching a Sputnik documentary. These scenes, writes the gallery in a statement, describe “an orphaned post-Soviet ‘generation’ that came of age in an ideological vacuum. Having disowned their past, they are adrift in an indeterminate present. They construct worlds from fashion, ornament, and spectacle – a defense against historic dislocation.”
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