Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art

St. Petersburg, Russia

With her creative practice, Dasha Pears aims to bring to the fore the little things in life that constantly accompany us yet escape our attention. By finding an aesthetic expression to what is going on in people’s minds and souls she points the way toward inner peace.

Albeit the artist’s creations seem surreal, they were not inspired by dreams or other forays into the subconscious. According to Dasha, her art is psychorealistic or, more accurately, subjectively realistic, which ensures it stays approachable to the viewer. She constructs her imaginary worlds out of the photographs she takes, maintaining that ‘the edited reality is way cooler than the real one.’ Photography, however, cannot fully detach itself from objective reality. Although intentionally keeping such little imperfections as wrinkles in clothes and wall cracks in her pictures, Dasha never uses stock photos offering stereotyped imagery.

Seeking to add depth to her characters, Dasha Pears pays close attention to every detail in her artworks which are carefully composed of individual photographic fragments. In this way, she ‘fine-tunes’ the reality she creates by ridding it of the noise and clutter of the real world. The main protagonist here, however, is not the human character, but the overall ambience reminiscent of Scandinavian minimalism where tranquillity, purity, and freshness reign supreme.


Interview about the solo exhibition in the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art