Chernobyl

by Anna Markham

In 1986, the 50,000 inhabitants of Pripyat were evacuated because of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, an accident caused by human error. The city remains a radioactive museum of abandoned homes, schools, and other public spaces. Pripyat and Chernobyl exist within the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone, a 1000-square-mile area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, within a landscape scarred by extreme radiation, and left uninhabitable for the next several millennia. The absence of people and the permanence of radiation makes the Exclusion Zone a monument frozen in 1986.

As I continue to make work with Chernobyl in mind, I explore toxicity and radiation and the feelings this intangible entity evokes by creating strange environments for mutated forms to occupy; these environments have distorted scale, altered perspective, and dramatic color. I make work primarily through printmaking, drawing, and painting, and combine them every now and then for some mixed media. With my print work I beckon viewers to become witnesses of something strange and unsettling, bringing deformity and mutability to the forefront.

Anna Markham graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2019. She currently lives in Atlanta, where you can find her thinking about gopniks, Soviet disillusionment, nuclear weirdness, and making weird art about it. Anna explores toxicity, radiation, and mutability through printmaking, drawing, painting, and multimedia work and continues to respond to the effects of radiation and the feelings this intangible entity evokes.

For more: https://zdarovaanna.com/