Dayana Matasheva
About the Artist
Dayana Matasheva is a visual artist based in Montreal. Originally from Uzbekistan, she has been working in the medium of photography and video for the past ten years. She received a Bachelor's degree in philology (2015) and film production (2020), making storytelling an integral part of her practice. Dayana completed an artist residency at Eastern Bloc, where she explores the role of GANs in visual narrative, community and world-building. Dayana's photographs are currently offered for purchase or rental through the Art Volt Collection.
Artwork credit: Dayana Matasheva, Familiar Faces, GAN and photography, 2022.
About the Work
Familiar Faces is an endeavour to paint a queer Central Asian community through the lens of an Uzbek immigrant. The artist uses AI and photography as her main creative tools to conceive a dystopian fantasy of queer Uzbeks who barely ever had any depiction in the art history canon of Central Asia. In an attempt to construct a universal and simultaneously subjective image of Uzbek queerness, Dayana uses her self-portraiture, family snapshots, and photographs in the public domain as source material for an AI to generate dreamlike portraits containing traces of thousands of Uzbek features. Surreal and fantastical, these portraits remind us that queerness exists merely in the realm of collective imagination in a country where it is punishable by law.
