I first met Adriana Farmiga, a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and educator when coordinating an Artsy sale to benefit Ukrainian refugees right after the start of the full-scale invasion in the spring of 2022. Farmiga was instrumental in bringing together the New York art community to support a humanitarian cause deeply personal to her. Now as a faculty member and dean of Cooper Union’s School of Art, Farmiga still finds time to continue her artistic practice preparing for her September exhibition at Marisa Newman Projects in New York City.

Having grown up with one foot psychologically anchored in the States and the other in Ukraine during the Soviet period, Adriana Farmiga’s work is deeply influenced by her upbringing. The artist's concept of dichotomous iconography originates from two contrasting worlds: one characterized by consumerist excess and the other by scarcity. This dichotomy is central to her practice, where she alternates between sculpture and drawing, often pulling from biographical influences.

In her ongoing exhibition Adriana Farmiga: Index at Marisa Newman Projects on view through October 30, Farmiga presents approximately thirty sculptures arranged in a line around the gallery’s perimeter, upside down, like protest posters in the form of masks. The lower half of the gallery will be painted with a wall color called Baker-Miller pink, a color associated with subduing restless populations, described by British conceptual artist Ryan Gander as “the line of passivity.” The focal point of the exhibition is the artist’s investigation of what it means to us as a human species when digital, oversimplified expressions extinguish the degrees of feelings, shades of meaning, and nuances of thought. Farmiga conducts this investigation in real-time, examining the socio-digital evolution, regression, or devaluation of what we hold dear as expressions of our humanity. We can’t afford much hindsight or perspective; we are in the midst.

Farmiga was born in the U.S. to refugees from the Soviet Union who narrowly escaped assassination and starvation. After a perilous journey through war-ravaged Eastern Europe and displaced persons camps, the family eventually found refuge in Argentina, where they lived in abject poverty surrounded and bolstered by a community in similar circumstances. There, the family waited for years before they were finally sponsored to come to the U.S., where the artist was born soon after. As Farmiga says, “I did not learn English before I was in (public) American grade school. My family would spend many years traveling back and forth to the Soviet Union to visit our relatives there and bring them materials for survival and underground market exchanges– jeans, bibles, cigarettes, etc. I’m dating myself, but I distinctly remember one of my cousins being excited to get a cassette tape of Deep Purple from the U.S. on one of my visits.”

The artist’s preoccupation with collecting, particularly collecting in pairs, comes from this point of personal reference, trying to reconstruct her concept of the world through objects, underlying the scarcity of the material. For her MFA thesis at Bard College, Farmiga started an installation titled “Noah’s Ark”, assembling pairs of objects color-coded into jewel-like shapes, framing our every day in a perfect consumerist assembly line. This earlier assemblage work, according to Farmiga, was organized around her experience growing up in a refugee community: “What is survival like, how do I as an artist come to understand what image-making, iconography, and propaganda are? In my still lives, I will often combine separate or disparate items almost like in visual sentences.”

When asked why she chose certain forms or objects, Farmiga responded: “There is something that happens when I register an object that can be equal parts abstract and knowable to us. I am drawn to materials that can sit in a potentially abstract condition, where often they are very graphic. For example, the gingham pattern I’ve been working with recently is a good opportunity to think of potentialities. It is a real object, it is like a napkin (but it also references domestic and feminine identity, be it a critique or a reverence). I like to think in terms of monumentality, scale, and perception. Monuments (and who we commemorate) were always a point of fascination to me.”

As Farmiga’s practice evolved, she sought to incorporate time as a material, adding wit and humor to her assemblages while organizing her thoughts around form. Farmiga's installation titled HA HA FRESH (after a now-gone eponymous corner store on 9th Avenue in Chelsea) presented at La Mama Gallery in 2017 was one such example, as the artist investigated the idea of a bodega as “a ground zero for still life.” (Anecdotally, the genre of still life finds its origins in Spanish wine cellars/shops, where the inventory of these locations was arranged into what was referred to as “bodegon.”). The bodega as a site presents a very specific, almost every street-specific microcosm of a community. A selection of products available at a local bodega tells you a lot about where exactly you are in New York or the country. Working with sets of pineapples and flowers, Farmiga played with the art history of ubiquitous Dutch or Rembrandt flower displays, but also with the iconography of pineapples as they come across in The Great Gatsby or The House of Mirth as symbols of luxury and social status. By combining these implied and direct meanings Farmiga created and recreated cultural patterns that could be read at a glance, but as one circulated through them, other layers revealed themselves, sometimes involving puns and double-takes. As Farmiga says “I love the form of an aphorism or proverb; they were always ingrained in my upbringing. Pithy, airtight, digestible pieces of poetry, literature, or thought with double, triple, quadruple meanings…I was always drawn to this.”

Another important element of Farmiga’s practice is the emphasis on the liminal and in-between state. This characteristic mirrors her preoccupation with the current state of Ukraine as it is experiencing an existential threat from neighboring Russia. “It's painful and difficult for me to discuss the ongoing Ukrainian war. Coping with ancestral trauma while witnessing the horrors in Ukraine requires all my strength just to get through daily routines. My family in Ukraine has been severely affected, and the upcoming U.S. election compounds my sense of dread. Many don't fully understand the far-reaching consequences of this invasion for global stability. The situation grows more desperate each day, and I pray for a turning point because the alternative is unimaginable. Yet, Ukrainians persist, and I come across stories daily about their intrepid resistance, which makes me so proud. I hear stories of artists and poets who are doing unimaginable deeds of courage. Meanwhile, I’m doing what I can to raise awareness and keep people informed. Unfortunately, attention has faded, and war fatigue is real, but this isn’t going away”.

The liminal space between personal circumstances and geopolitical uncertainty has long occupied Farmiga as an artist. Her upcoming exhibition will feature a triptych of watercolors from her still-life collection, where red, yellow, and blue materials are categorized and reproduced in a painstakingly analog process. These drawings, a detailed exploration of everyday objects, are what Farmiga refers to as "deep looking," a process of examining, interpreting, and developing objects to reveal different perspectives. In the current state of global uncertainty, Farmiga engages with and presents abstract ideas that have very direct applications to our lives and emotions. Never a fan of just esoteric and exalted art circles, Farmiga's abstract masks are relatable because they are warning us: we live in a world where soon we could become just emojis.