SONIA MELNIKOVA ART PHOTOGRAPHY

The ARCHITECTURAL FANTASIES series is a digitally “rebuilt” and recontextualizied improvisation based on my original photographs of ordinary buildings, mostly in San Francisco, where I live, and other inconspicuous objects. It was inspired by my lifelong fascination with the works of Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudi, as well as the Art Nouveau art and architecture movement in Russia and Europe. As a young architect in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s, I was so taken by Gaudi's works, which I could see only in rare photographs in architecture magazines, that I had dreams about his buildings. After I finally saw them in 1987 during a trip to Barcelona, they became more real and my dreams stopped, only to resurface many years later in these photographic fantasies.

Related series: ABSTRACT THINKING