About the Artist

Nana creates in diverse media and technologies; she is an artist, filmmaker and independent curator. Nana (Nanuka) Tchitchoua was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1978. Growing up through the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire; her surroundings were at once tumultuous and immutable. She was predisposed with a sense of deep connections to her ancestral past, and the fragile translucence of the present. The crumbling societal structure in Georgia forced her family to flee in the early 90s. Throughout this, she developed a personal aesthetic through painting, and later filmmaking; a spiritual collision of fragmentary epochs. After immigrating to the United States in 1992, she studied at the California Institute of the Arts, receiving a BFA in Art in 2000 and an MFA in Experimental Filmmaking in 2002. Over the past six or seven years Nana has been associated with * The Museum of Jurassic Technology where she has strongly interwoven her enormously rich Georgian culture into the workings and the fabric of the institution.

Nana's work is a fusion of ancient archetypes, ethnographic treasures and various cultural icons, presented in an evocative arrangement that belies the modern context in which it is produced. In navigating the tenuous path of her dual cultural identity she asserts the transformative possibilities of finding beauty amid ruins, making something out of nothing - a cross-referencing of images that are fiercely nostalgic for a heroic and romantic dream world. She draws inspiration from Byzantine aesthetics and her Georgian lineage with a history of four thousand years. Her cinematic interventions into painting are her personal visions of fantasy landscapes, wonderlands populated by exotic figures and mysterious structures.

Nana is a long time collaborator with her husband on her film work, Travis Wade Ivy. She is also an initiator of artists exchange residency/collaborative projects with Gregg Fleishman Studio: The Kindergarten for All Ages and The Guest Room Projects. Nana returns to Georgia regularly to participate in the lively contemporary art culture there. In the United States, she shows her work in exhibitions and film festivals. Highlights include TOMORROWLAND: CalArts in Moving Pictures, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 2006; Fragments from a Lovers Discourse, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, 2006; Over Here-There, The Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Stanford University 2002; and worldwide in Holland, France, China, Spain, Norway, Germany, and Russia. Currently she lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

* The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a non-profit organization. An educational institution located in Culver City, California, dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of cultural and ethnographic studies. www.mjt.org