The first “robot” series I ever did, while a student at Concordia University.

It started as a slightly traumatized joke and became a caricature.

Summer of 2008 I worked for a Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg. The courses were in English, but as soon as I walked out of the classrooms of the Herzen University Pedagogical institute blackly humorous materialism, or cynicism, or ironic gloom seemed to hang in the air. The whole thing was heightened by the constant summer daylight of the white nights.

That summer also crystallized my sense of having spent my whole life watching events unfold from the underbelly of the world was not an illusion.

Brought up with leftist-Latin-American utopic notions about Cold-war Communism, the heaps of still-cheap soviet-era souvenirs evoked something a little different for me than for most tourists crowding the city that summer. I found myself experiencing an improbable (and probably off-target) deja vu as I wandered the streets and suburbs. Everything, (on a vastly grander scale) connected me to the tired propaganda of my childhood…

The first doll, turned on the lathe, was supposed to evoke a carefully-crafted kitsch object. The second, vacuum-cast plastic, motorized, supposed to evoke a cheap, tacky, mass-produced toy. The third, seven feet tall, a cross between a WW2 plane and a giant baby’s slightly crushed toy.

The metal matryoshka was eventually stolen off my back porch. Probably to be sold for scrap.