Elena Kovylyaeva, Creative Wanderings

When Elena Kovylyaeva arrived in Provincetown in October as a Fine Arts Work Center visual arts fellow, many of the shops in town were getting ready to close for the season. They were discarding unsold and unwanted merchandise in trash bins and side alleys along Commercial Street.

“All this cheap plastic stuff shipped here for the short summer tourist season, and then it’s thrown out,” says Kovylyaeva. “That’s what I’m interested in.”

Her studio at FAWC holds some of these throwaway items arranged in rows or piled haphazardly. They include Styrofoam heads; velvet décolletage necklace displays; boxes of plastic stands for sculpted crystals; faux-ivory Buddha heads with red tassels; small decorative mirrors; and deflated, brightly colored pool floats.

Kovylyaeva was born in Belovo, Russia in 1991, just as the dissolution of the Soviet Union was taking place. At five, she moved with her family to Düsseldorf when the German government opened its borders to ethnic Germans from the former U.S.S.R. After high school, she studied in Berlin and Leipzig before moving to Baltimore, where she received an M.F.A. in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I never lived anywhere for more than two or three years,” she says. “There’s not really a home that I can return to.”