Irina Lotarevich "Schemas"

Schemas designate both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining information by means of organizing phenomena and experiences. Known in cognitive therapy (as worldviews, stereotypes, archetypes, and social roles revealing maladaptive patterns of perception, emotion, and behavior), and in computational science (as templates of similarities for algorithmic understanding and action), they arrange stimuli into signs and meaning. As mental and internalized representations of the world, they reproduce and reinforce relationships between bodies and environments, that “Schemas” imitates and attempts to disentangle.

Irina Lotarevich was born in 1991 in Rybinsk, Russia, and lives and works in Vienna. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at What Pipeline, Detroit (2017), FUTURA, Prague (2016), and Eli Ping Frances Perkins, New York (2016). Lotarevich earned a BFA from the Hunter College of New York and currently studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.