Molly Surazhsky: Miss Americhka

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Miss Americhka a solo exhibition by Molly Surazhsky. Miss Americhka depicts modes of self-portraiture and performance art through sculpture, photography, installation, and digitally printed textile-based works that explore, critique, and satirize this uniquely polarizing time in America’s political landscape. The title of the exhibition is a reference to the artist's grandmother’s endearing Russian-inflected nickname for America. This will be Molly Surazhsky’s first exhibition with the gallery.

In the large-scale work Dermokratizatsiya (Shitocracy), 2022, Surazhsky investigates the ramifications of attempting to convert a communist regime into a democracy and America’s involvement in Russian politics after the fall of the U.S.S.R. At over 10 feet in height, and comprised of digitally printed sections of satin with organza ribbons melting off the surface in the shape of the American flag, the work harkens back to the 1990s. In the upper corner of the flag, where the stars represent the fifty states, Surazhsky has inserted TIME magazine’s July 15, 1996 cover documenting the United States’ intervention in the election of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first “democratically” elected president. Below, under the cascade of red, white, and blue ribbons, images of Russia’s first McDonald’s being mobbed by customers, a family photo of the artist and her family posing in front of an image of Bill Clinton displayed on a storefront in Kharkov*, Ukraine, and cartoons of the hammer and sickle are included with other images referencing the political upheaval of the era. The title of the work, Dermokratizatsiya, is post-Soviet Russian slang that translates as shitocracy.