Her Type

Her Type, 2017-19, HD video, color, sound, TRT: 4min 28sec (starring Inna Yesilevskaya), Excerpt Running Time: 1 min.

Her Type opens with my mother loading a selfie of me into FaceApp—a smartphone application that generates realistic transformations of photographic portraits. She adds a “male” filter to the picture. With the “male” filter, my selfie resembles a portrait of my Russian father, now deceased, when he was my age. Shot in 2017; edited and mixed in 2019. Short excerpt below:

FESTIVALS

Defy Film Festival, Nashville, TN, Aug, 2022.

CURRENTS NEW MEDIA: Circuits, New Mexico, June, 2022

Audience Choice Award, Burnt Video Art and Experimental Film Festival , 2021

GALLERY SCREENINGS

Together is Better, STOVE WORKS, Chattanooga, TN, Dec 3, 2021 - Jan 15, 2022

August Screening Series at Creative Space for Lease, Los Angeles, 2018.

FemBot: Videos About Technology, Made By Women and Non-Binary Artists at the Hand Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2018.

Off Days: Screening Series, Indianapolis, IN, 2018.

Data Spell at the Border Space Project, Brooklyn, NY, 2018.

Blank Plots: Screening, and Performance Event at Black Vulture Projects, IN, 2018.

Masha Vlasova: I Don’t Think You Can See the Island Solo Show at Serial Box Projects, MO, 2018.

Frame Work: Works by Astri Snodgrass and Masha Vlasova at the Fuller Projects, IN, 2017.

CONFERENCE SCREENINGS

CAA 2020 Media Lounge, New Media Caucus at College Art Association Conference, Chicago, IL, 2020.

Sightlines 2019: Screen Production and the Academy, RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, Melbourne, Australia, 2019.

Visible Evidence XXV, International Conference on Documentary Film and Media, 2018.

Artist’s Response to “Her Type” for Burnt Film Festival by Chantal Partamian:


”The time when a photograph is taken, a photograph is seen and then the time when it’s looked at again.

How much can one rely on the photographs? And how does one make sure a day is remembered when it does not have a signifier? Ikehata’s film is a mixture of archives and landscapes but also the narrator’s memories and those of their mother. A blend of past and present where mother/daughter realities, memories and their physical existence in a space in different times, intertwine.

The overlap in Masha Vlasova’s “Her Type”, is that between the filmmaker and their father. By the manipulation of a photograph through a masculinizing application, Masha now resembles her dad. The space between the mother’s gaze and the photograph on the phone becomes that of a romantic recollection, a longing for a deceased lover. A space where intimate desires surface and tension between the subject and the camera is palpable…”

Read full response HERE