Painter and designer Daria Balova looks at reality through “a needle’s eye”. Her interests focus on macro-world, objects of which she turns into “city in a box” with her imagination, peeping at dramas that take place in there. “I have a box to put in everything that then can become a landscape for a “little tragedy” or story: twigs, feathers, seeds, petals. Sometimes the picture immediately appears before my eyes. But more often I just lay it all out on a white background to study through a macro lens, imagining what could be happening in such reality. And then, using computer, I implant the fictitious images/plots in the photograph“. This way tiny still life turns into a full landscape. But its scale and gravity are changed and everything’s in slow motion, like in a dream...