In this series from the late 60s to early 70s, Mikaliov has overlayed two colour slides, creating “sandwiches" - beautifully composed tableaux of glamorous naked women, surreal urban landscapes and strange scenes of everyday Soviet life.
I can see why someone mentioned this artist for me to look at for my work. I have been using multiple exposure as a way of exploring memory, temporality and emotion and am drawing on this technique again in my current project about dreams and a journey.
Mikailov has carefully considered colour, composition, emotion, harmony and and discord when constructing the images for Yesterday’s Sandwich.
Red is a group of eighty-four colour photographs taken about the same time in Mikhailov’s home town of Kharkiv (present day Ukraine). The public & private, indoor & outdoor landscapes, portraits, vignettes and milieus trace the banal mundanities of everyday life in the Soviet Union under communist rule.
Shot using colour film, an unusual luxury in the Ukraine at this time, every one containing the colour red, after which the series is named and clearly the colour we associate, politically with the Soviet Union and communism, in general. The art historian Urs Stahel has observed how Mikhailov ‘attentively, seismographically even, traces every little speck of red in the Russian-Ukrainian landscape ... and visualises the saturation and thorough coloration of the social body’. The cumulative effect, according to curator Margarita Tupitsyn, is that of an entire society ‘contaminated by the visual toxicity of red’.
The series bridges the documentary and conceptual aspects of Mikhailov’s practice. Borrowing from formal representations to constructivist photomontage and journalistic photo-essays published in Soviet propaganda publications.
