WATERTOWN — On Sunday, March 13, at 2 p.m., the Armenian Museum of America will host the opening of a new exhibition titled “The Lost Empire: The Show You Haven’t Seen Before,” by Arevik Tserunyan. The opening will include a reception held in the Adele & Haig Der Manuelian Galleries on the third floor of the museum.
The event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be served at the reception.
The exhibition is a sculptural installation accompanied by an intriguing theatrical performance and music. Visitors will discover new dimensions and forms. This is a royal tableau of a fictitious empire, encrusted with sappy and bejeweled materials. This exhibition was created out of an attempt to balance the deeply solemn and weighty history of Armenia and lineages of the past with a sense of the absurd, questioning the importance of these stories. Because of this balance, we look at a royal scene through the lens of a circus, in which individuals struggle for the mirage of nonexistent power.
Born in 1987 in Yerevan, Armenia, Tserunyan received her BA in English, Spanish and Education from Yerevan State Linguistic University and a MFA from the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts. During her MFA studies, Tserunyan focused on drawing and painting. She specialized in Western Impressionistic and Armenian Post-Impressionistic styles, a mixture of constructivism and post-soviet artistic movements, influenced by the Russian traditional academic school. In her second year there, she was commissioned to do illustrations for a Bulgarian fairy tales collection, published the following year.
In 2013, she enrolled in the master’s program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In the US, Tserunyan began exploring other media with new works in collage, sculpture, fashion and exhibits with large-scale installations. Currently, her concentration is installations at various scales, which are often accompanied by narratives interspersed with drawings and illustrations.
The exhibit is going to be at the museum for one week.
