Yulia Nefedova – Untitled (201X)

Nefedova’s style is akin to what you’d get if you locked the guy who made Where’s Waldo in a room with nothing except Toilet Paper Magazine back issues, American Apparel catalogs and reams of blank paper.

In other words: casually irreverent, audaciously transgressive and charmingly warped.

Yet, what makes the work singular is its curiosity. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen people doing most of the things Nefedova documents hers as doing. And there’s this wonderful ambiguity about whether she’s asking herself I wonder what this would look like vs. I know what this looks like because I’m just drawing from what I see in my own life–an ambiguity frequently complicated by her tendency to draft her own likeness into her visual experiments. It’s not always easy to determine whether these self-referential flashes are tongue-in-cheek jokes or confessions.