Shapes of Imposition: Kim Farbota and Svetlana Shigroff
DMST Atelier is pleased to present Shapes of Imposition, a two-artist exhibition featuring the paintings and sculptures of Kim Farbota and Svetlana Shigroff. In conversation, these works explore the body as both a vessel of projection and conduit of interiority. In Kim’s work, crude oil fed into raw canvas spreads and creeps along the cotton fibers over months. The seepage resolves into female figures, hunched and absorbed in elongated moments of modern suspension. These unstable bodies operate as infrastructure, sites through which digitally networked perception, affect, and (mis)information circulate. As the oil wicks and migrates, postures and expressions shift. The overlapping forms bleed into one another in a process of mutual reshaping. Svetlana’s sculptures act as psychic catches, absorbing the viewer’s lusts, assumptions, and derisions. Domestic ready-made fragments are fused with intimate artifacts of hair, teeth and likeness - then poked, preened, twisted and assembled, embalmed and adorned into dysmorphic female forms. The reanimation of these objects into abject sculptures implicates the traditional feminine, upheld by our consumptive culture. What emerges is not nostalgia, but a myth still operative—quietly structuring how the feminine is consumed and contained. Both artists use material rumination to explore how external impositions form and deform the body-object. Crude oil and hair act as containers of time, one ecological the other human. Where Kim’s figures behave as porous scaffolding for networked psyches, Svetlana’s sculptures act as violent yet vulnerable containers of interiority. In charged adjacency, their works consider the contemporary feminized body as a site shaped by technological mediation, cultural projection and deeper inheritance.
Kim Farbota (b. 1988, Chicago) is a painter, sculptor, and installation artist living and working in Los Angeles. Trained in neuroscience and law, she worked across academia and legal practice before turning to visual art. Her work examines how authority takes form through institutions, images, and bodies, tracing the ways hierarchical structures shape agency and meaning. Drawing on visual languages of control and reverence, including religious iconography and technocratic display, she relocates questions of power and sanctity to the realm of embodied perception. Her work engages materials carrying geopolitical and intimate charge, including crude oil and bodily artifacts. Webs, feminine forms, and central voids emerge from processes of seepage, contact, and accumulation, unsettling control.
Svetlana Shigroff (b. 1982) is a Los Angeles–based artist working in mixed-media sculpture and textile assemblage. Her materially dense works draw from the body, archetypal figures, and talismanic forms to examine inheritance, symbolic lineage, and intra-personal conflict. Through repetitive processes of looping fiber, stitching fabric, and casting her own form, she constructs sculptures that operate as physical incantations — spaces where intimacy and violence, adornment and defense, tenderness and threat coexist. Though often wry in situ, her work carries an undercurrent of tension and visceral uncanniness implicit in the lived female experience. Shigroff teaches Fashion and Sculpture studio courses at Santa Monica College and is cofounder of LA Tactile Lab in downtown Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Science with Honors and a Postgraduate Degree in Tertiary Education from The University of Queensland