Kudrjavcev-DeMilner’s work depicts an idealized natural world populated and destabilized by artificial elements. In her collages, synthetic structures, severed from their original context, acquire a new abstract identity, while in turn alter their new environment. The collage, on first glance, may appear to be an interior or a landscape, but the work is ultimately about the symbiotic and shifting relationship between its multiple parts. A carpet, cut from a photo of a room, becomes a simplified, shadowed surface, yet still bears negative spaces left from table legs and other interior elements that have been cut away. In the completed collage, these negative spaces frame and reveal the images beneath, often shaping the unlikeliest of materials into the suggestion of absent forms.

The paintings in the exhibition also reflect Kudrjavcev-DeMilner’s interests in space and form, using abstraction to create characters, problems and stories. In their joining of the geometric and organic, and in the occasional inclusion of more explicit narrative elements, the paintings open a dialog between the formal and the symbolic. Like the collages, they disorient the viewer in a way that invites questions, and suggest that there exist hidden qualities-underlying meanings and movements-in the world around us.