Jenny Yurshansky - The Border Will Not Hold #1
Jenny Yurshansky is an LA based artist whose work primarily focuses on her experiences as a refugee. She explores her trauma utilizing a research based approach, intaking information through forms of landscape, historical documents, and social constructs that reveals itself as an overarching feeling of loss, absence, and erasure of identity. Yurshansky’s projects are often created over a long period of time, weaving together stories that mold into a visual story, told through her practice. She often utilizes a variety of materials in her multidisciplinary work including glass, charred steel, plywood, laser cut stone, and the written word. Yurshansky graduated from UC Irvine with an MFA in Visual Art and attended the Malmö Art Academy as a postgrad in Critical Studies.
More Information via: http://www.jennyyurshansky.com/Jenny_Yurshansky/About.html
Yurshanky's recent work also deals with the displacement of her family. In her installation There Were No Roses There (Diaspora), she presents an abstraction of the movement over time and history of her family members over three generations who were forced to escape their homes or get murdered in what is now Moldova. The region of Moldova has been fought over, traded, and ruled by five different authoritarian regimes. With each new state of oppression, there was a debilitating ethnic purge that took place. This pattern in constant and is still occurring today, as Russia is currently invading and attacking this region.
The Border Will Not Hold #1
Jenny Yurshansky’s piece titled The Border Will Not Hold #1 consists of thin silk chiffon collaged with traditional Moldovan folk patterns and Soviet-era illustrations sourced from an alphabet book The alphabet books were one of the few items Jenny Yurshansky's mother packed when she fled from Moldova. Shortly after arriving to America, Jenny was born. The piece exhibited in LOOK! is the first created in a series of four each with their own unique color palette and children's book imagery. The images are illustrated children at each of the four corners of the silk chiffon, each image separated with a border of embroidered patterns. The children are all looking to and from different angles of the embroidery as if it is creating an environment for which the children can live in, further linking the contrasting styles included in the piece.
All images of children and parents are illustrated in light hues, creating a cheerful and calm tone. The patterns and imagery are delicately weaved onto silk organza that is suspended in a frame with meticulously stitched thread. The dimensions of the piece is 28 ¼” x 25” x 1 ¼” and is meant to be hung away from the wall so as to cast a shadow behind it. The shadows from the work have hard lines and cast the forms of the images in great detail. Some people disappear into outlines in the shadow while others cast a full form. The pattern work is woven in a black thread, with stitching thick enough to create an opaque shape ideal for translation in shadow form.
The patterns are somewhat disassembled, with thinner lines of pattern framing the composition on the top and bottom, and larger patterns surrounding the children’s book images. Overall the composition is broken up in quarters, with each quarter focusing on a different child interacting with and questioning their environment.
Reflecting
What I find most intriguing about this piece is the use of the space it is installed in. The physical frame, tapestry, and threading is just half of the piece. What activates the piece into it’s full potential is the use of sunlight, which projects a shadow of the intricate imagery included on the piece. These shadows uphold the general structure of the embroidery, but the images lose details, color, and context, a direct representation of the erasure of culture and identity in Moldova that originally enticed Yurshansky’s family to leave their home country. Utilizing the shadow as a crucial aspect of the work opens the piece up to the space around the piece itself. It becomes a part of the environment and the viewers are therefore more immersed in its aura.
The imagery included in the piece directly confronts the trauma and systematic oppression that is often masked in seemingly benign images and symbols. The folk patterns are beautiful and, from first glance, apolitical. These patterns however are a sort of mark of Moldovan heritage. These patterns could only be worn if you were Moldovan, and even though the artist's parents were from there, they were never seen as part of the community due to the antisemitism that forced them to escape the country in the first place. These patterns, paired with the traditional Russian children's book drawings speak to how every day images and symbols act as quiet propaganda that perpetuates systematic separation of the "other", allowing for these attitudes to become the norm in society. The pairing of these images also realize the experience of constantly living between two cultures, never really feeling at home in either of them. The composition of the piece supports that feeling, as each child is literally trapped in their own cell, unable to engage in a community of their own.
Works that utilize crafts that are typically thought of as "woman's work" is especially interesting for myself. As a fledgling artist learning about what draws me into the art world, I find myself leaning further into sewing and embroidery and the process of how these skills have been passed from mother to daughter for generations. I recently had the opportunity to interview Yurshansky, and she gave insights on how the process of embroidering with her mom created a space for them to bond, for her to learn about Moldova and what it was like to live there. She often said her mother very seldom spoke of her life in Moldova. She would answer questions in very short, one word answers. When they embroidered together however, it was like a wall was bring slowly chipped away between them. Embroidering for hours and hours with her daughter made her feel safe enough to talk about the past. Sewing and embroidery is not just a craft, these acts generate an environment that melds together worlds that are usually separate. Young and older generations of women are able to come together for the craft to bond, tell stories, create, and to sit with one another and carry on the art form for the sake of tradition.
