ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tatiana Parnaikova's skills as an artist straddle two distinct disciplines. She is a master of traditional photography, completely comfortable with both its modern practices and those of its past, and a contemporary artist who views historical methodologies as tools to express modern sensibilities.

Her latest work has departed wholly from the confines of film and camera, and paints a broader, luxurious image in cyan blue and warm hues of archival white.  She has painstakingly cultivated a unique niche in the rarefied Cyanotype medium, a mid-19th-century photographic discipline originally used for practical purposes such as proofing and blueprinting, but revisited periodically by photographic artists seeking an alternative to modern media.

Detailed, delicate, and highly individual, Tatiana's cyanotype prints suffuse a sense of antiquity - the tangled web of living and dead threads of life - with a fresh, contemporary edge that is powerful and subtle. The work is decidedly feminine, yet forceful and unyielding as she explores the full bloom and withering of the natural cycles of life. Tatiana mixes floral arrangements with other, coarser and more provocative elements such as snakeskin and fauna to compose symbolic and engaging oeuvres. Tipping her hat to the masters of alternative technique such as Anna Atkins, Man Ray, Adam Fuss and others, she manages to innovate while remaining historically referential, if not reverential. This seemingly difficult task, bridging old and new, is made easier by her by-birth-connection to the art history.

Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Tatiana's earliest art-educational experiences were shaped by perhaps the richest and most intact art-historical environment in the western world, but also by the profoundly repressive pre-perestroika Soviet society, balanced precariously between the love of its art and the forcible silencing or controlling of its artistic voices. Her nascent experiences in the arts coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Equipped with a BFA in Restoration from the Muchin School of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, Tatiana found herself in close contact with some of the most revered architectural landmarks and alfresco paintings in the Soviet Union. Working as a restorer, she came to know by feel, touch, smell and peeling archeological layer Peter and Paul's Fortress, Narva's Gates, the Ksehinsky mansion, and many other historical St. Petersburg buildings and their treasures.

This intimate contact with the past served as the perfect formative influence for Tatiana as she absorbed the essence of master painters and architects and synthesized her own ideas and direction as an artist. Despite, or perhaps because of, her relative maturity, Tatiana's foray into the arts has been spring-loaded, driven by an uncommonly clear passion and focus. Maturity has left a wonderful accent on her visual language, a language tinged by the colors of pure commitment, the liberty of released thought, and inspired direction.

Cyanotype has been Tatiana's creative destination for some time, and now she has arrived. Her new approach to the old process is original and innovative due to the unexpected reversed ‘positive’ tonality of the prints and their virtually limitless size.

Although the symbolism and content of Tatiana’s work expands well beyond localized representation, the unusual clarity of each highly detailed print as well as the overall complexity of the images makes her work distinct and pioneering. 

Tatiana earned a BFA in Photography from Concordia University after graduating from Dawson Institute of Professional photography with a Patron's award for Outstanding Performance. She is now a full-time artist, curator, and teacher.

 Text by Randy Cole