Nightmares and lullabies

In Russia, many babies are lulled to sleep with the song Bayu Bayushki Bayu, which intones, “Do not lie on the edge of your cradle, the gray wolf is going to come, bite you and carry you away.” For Russianborn, San Francisco-based artist Nadezda, the idea that songs of sleep can also be deeply unsettling is the concept for her latest solo show at Haven Gallery, titled Nightmares and Lullabies. “Sometimes the line between what is a lullaby and what is a nightmare becomes deceptively skewed,” she says. “In my work I play with a balance of the two and this dictates the final mood of the piece.”

The body of work was created over a period of more than six months, and Nadezda comments that she isn’t the same artist now as when she began working. “This wedge of personal and artistic development is an exciting gradient to study while guessing what sort of ideas and artistic experimentations may come my way tomorrow,” she says.

The artist was previously involved in the film industry as a character concept artist, and the manner in which her figures are meticulously posed and costumed give her paintings a narrative bent that is cinematic in nature. “The myriad of emotions and narratives that can be expressed in body language, costume and suggested environment has so many possibilities for artistic exploration that it becomes a bottomless well of new inspiration for my artwork,”