Michal Chelbin: Alicia in Golden Dress, 2005
“The images in this series are an attempt to capture human stories in everyday life, those that exist in the space between the odd and the ordinary.”—Michal Chelbin
Alicia in a Golden Dress is from Michal Chelbin’s Strangely Familiar series, a body of work that features sympathetic pictures of performers and wrestlers from small towns in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, England, and Israel. In the introduction to the artist’s monograph, Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes (Aperture, 2008), Leah Ollman writes that in Alicia in a Golden Dress, “a self-possessed young woman in radiant gold displays her poise in a dancer’s turned-out stance. Like a showpiece or a pet, she performs on command under the watchful eye of her grizzled father, who stands behind their equally battered car.”
Chelbin’s most frequent subjects are children and adolescents. As she states, “My aim is to record a scene where there is a mixture of direct information and enigmas and in which there are visual contrasts between young and old, large and small, normal and abnormal. My playground lies between the private and the public, between fiction and documentary.”
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