Research Interests
Photography; Sculpture; Video
Biosketch
Pavel Romaniko was born in Pereslavl-Zalessky, a small town outside of Moscow, Russia, in 1980. He came to the United States at the age of seventeen. Romaniko completed a BA in Studio Arts from Northwestern College in Saint Paul, Minnesota (2002), and an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2009). Recent solo exhibitions include Nostalgia at Harriman Institute at Columbia, New York, Tyler Gallery, Northern Virginia Community College; Art Center, Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, CA, and Glory at Gallery Kunstler, Booksmart Studio, Rochester, NY. His work has been featured as part of Museum of Contemporary Photography Midwest Photographers project.
Pavel works with photographs, sculpture, and video. For his on-going project Nostalgia , Pavel Romaniko constructs miniature sets of building interiors using construction paper. Although reminiscent of domestic interiors Romaniko photographed in his previous series Russia (2005, 2007), and incorporating imagery from his series Still-Lifes (2007), most of Nostalgia's carefully lit interiors are not always specific to actual locations but instead become symbolic reflections on Russia's political landscape and history, exile, blurred memory, and Romaniko's own longing for a relationship with his personal and cultural past. The empty, melancholic interiors are not only paper constructions, they are reconstructions created from Romaniko's recollection of the past and found photographs. The nostalgia, Romaniko feels for his personal past, mirrors his native Russia's attempts at reconciliation with its tumultuous history and its uneasy relationship with a rapidly changing present.
