'God Room' by Viktor Timofeev at Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York

This installation (God Room, 2018) is made up of three types of work: colored pencil drawings, a wall mural, and a degenerative, two-channel video presented together with custom furniture. The drawings finish a series (A/B, 2018) I started earlier in the year, in which two colors (red and blue) embody two populations at odds. These entities live in one another at varying degrees of nested iterations, occasionally interrupted by outside forces in shades of grey. The drawings are presented in Room 1. The pastel mural (God Flower 6AB, 2018) is an evolution from a previous work (God Flower 1, 2017), which originally started as a way of decorating a fictional environment used in another exhibition. In that version, the iris was rendered in blue and green only, and the petals and stems were more naturalistic. Over the next versions, the petals and stems grew more abstract and I introduced a new petal color. The mural is presented in Room 2. The two-channel video (Abecedary for A and B, 2018) is a real-time degeneration of an alphabet and an explanatory map of the exhibition themes written (updated) in this alphabet. The degeneration divides each letter into four quadrants and cycles through sixteen permutations of the tops and bottoms (preserving horizontal symmetry) while also randomly swapping parts of  these letters. It is possible to navigate a four layer-deep history of these changes using the keyboard. The two channels are located in separate rooms–placed at a distance that takes about three seconds to traverse, which is also the pace at which the alphabet degenerates. The two-channel video is presented in Room 1 and 2.

– Viktor Timofeev