Yelena Yemchuk has had a number of fine art photography exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at Dactyl Foundation in 2002 and a group exhibition at Sotheby's, also in 2002. While Yelena the photographer works wonders with what actually exists, Yelena the painter can express the impossible, and we are honored and excited to be able to present her first painting exhibition. Her acrylic-on-paper compositions are sometimes ironic and whimsical and sometimes cutting and caustic. Circus performers, silky black cats, and crafty birds plot sinister misdemeanors and make general mischief. The characters and their interactions are complex. In one painting, a brown mutt protecting a blue ball looks worried as pregnant humanoid blue bird whispers in his ear, while surreptitiously reaching for his prize. In another, a dog has a rubber chicken and a bag of money that a gray cat seems to want. The execution is rich and painterly: green undertones deepen flesh tones. With simple strokes of her brush, she creates complicated and intelligent expressions. Fellow visionary Billy Corgan chose one of her paintings for the cover of his new poetry collection, Blinking with Fists, published by FSG. That work shows a masked rabbit-donkey, arms raised, balancing on a ball, who is also being held at gunpoint by a kingly bear. Strange. Most of the pieces show pairs of characters engaged in some crime or deceit. Her theme is secrecy: there is always so much going on that we never understand.

Judging from their eccentricities and fable feel, her subjects most likely come from the Ukrainian forest, with its eerie green swamp and primitive huts, and the Ukrainian cities with their colorful life-loving gypsies and little churches. Clearly, Yelena's early memories in Eastern Europe are the fabric with which she has woven her artistic worlds. In the midst of painting this series, Yelena returned to Ukraine. She was reminded how Odessa is home to criminal types that, well, just look criminal, even if they aren't. In a street side café you will see a fat cat Mafia boss, surround by seven short mice-like up-start crooks. They seem to have wandered right out of folktale. The Russians have a term, poshlust, for this underworld drama, which we would say is tawdry, meretricious, and cheap‹falsely attractive but destined to escape detection by most. What's interesting about poshlust, which to the Russian mind is both appalling and fascinating, is its excess. Yelena's characters, like the real characters she met in Odessa, are engaged in elaborate and unnecessary deception‹deception for the sake of deception. They hide; they cheat; they lie, even when there's nothing to be gained by it. Maybe this is what helps to make Yelena's visual narratives authentic though innocuous even when they depict some deliberate evil. As in a game, one character may be dismembered in one scene, but he may return whole in another. No one gets hurt, really.

Deceptive excess is in some ways inverse and in some ways parallel to the artistic excesses of Gothic architecture, in which an elaborately carved stone might be tucked away from view somewhere on an incredibly ornate and impossibly high ceiling. The conceit for Gothic art is that there's an omniscient Higher Audience for the hidden beauty. In Yelena's work, with its Gogolian relish for a surplus of strange detail, we have an actor playing murderer, costumed to perfection, right down to his dirty underwear. For whose benefit? It makes a criminal's petty schemes more significant to him if he believes that Someone cares and is watching; Someone might see; Someone will suspect, if the crime is not perfectly planned and executed. So these criminals lie, even in their own souls, with the hope none will catch on, not even themselves. Excess, gratuitousness, and irrelevant detail lend a sense of reality to falsity. It is the ridiculousness of evil that we see here, a truth caught so brilliantly by Gogol's nose or Dostoevsky's idiot.

A large and very long piece, the last piece created in the series, shows a funeral procession. When I learned she had decided to end the series this way, I thought, "Yes, of course," without realizing why this seemed so appropriate. As a visual narrative, the form of the series does work very well. The front gallery is populated by busy characters, running here and there, hanging out, getting into tussles. Then they all line up in the main gallery in an orderly (or maybe not so orderly) procession. But why a funeral? She told me that she had actually witnessed the death of black swan on her visit to the Ukraine. The swan appears as one of the characters in the main gallery, where he is not dying, but merely drunk. Painting the swan, she said she was anxious to see how another character would react to his being drunk. For a few of the pieces, Yelena can relate some "real life" circumstances that initially sparked a character. For instance, she was inspired by a bizarre newspaper headline involving a "black bear" and a "Jewish baby." For another piece, she was inspired by a friend's dream. However, details taken from life undergo such a thorough recombination and renovation in the nursery of Yelena's eccentric genius that it is useless to try to find their apparent symbolic meaning in real life.

Within the language of visual culture, animals are quite often symbolic of certain human traits: dogs for loyalty; cats for independence; mules for stubbornness. Yelena's work tempts you to feel that same kind of symbolism in, for example, the image of a zebra, but you can't quite say what a zebra "means" in any kind of universally accessible language. Looking at her work is a little like looking at some ancient form of pictograph. The meaning is there; you understand it viscerally, but you cannot translate it into rational thought.

Yelena's work helps us realize that there is an empirical basis of the "gut feeling" or "intuitive" knowledge, which we hold in distinction to reason. I don't want to try to distinguish between the so-called unconscious and conscious because I don't want to privileged one over the other. But I do want to distinguish between different ways of knowing, knowing within the language center of the brain and knowing elsewhere. I believe we do have immediate ways of knowing that are never linguistically felt. Visual artists, like Yelena, live more deeply in this other realm of knowing than most of us do, but it is an ability that we all share to some degree. Think about walking through the main area in Grand Central Station, countless people move in all directions, and you almost never bump into anyone. Your body is aware of whose pace is fast, whose is slow; who's paying attention, who's not, who's likely to suddenly change his or her mind and direction. You know all this and can maneuver with ease even though you never say to yourself, That man is about to turn left; That woman is about to pause at the newsstand. We don¹t realize the extent to which we are all acute readers of posture, gesture, and facial expression. Yelena has a special gift for reading and representing visceral language. With simple strokes of her brush, she creates complicated and intelligent expressions, complex gestures and suggestive postures. I think that many of our emotional responses are probably based on this visceral knowledge. That's why our emotions often surprise or betray us when we rage or swoon in ways that we can't defend intellectually. An assiduous viewer of Yelena's work will feel the meaning emotionally even when she has not named the specific details to herself. Sometimes the body knows before the "mind" does, or so says recent research in neuroscience. Scientists monitoring brain activity can actually see the brain make a decision or realize a change before the subject is aware that he or she has done so. This is why eureka always feels strangely like déjà vu. Yelena's work is like this; it conveys of feeling of surprise or sudden enlightenment about human emotions and intentions while at the same time affirming some deeper knowledge that we feel we already or always knew.

As a photographer Yelena Yemchuk has contributed to major publications including Japanese & Italian Vogue, ID magazine, and W and worked on campaigns such as Dries Van Noten and Cacharel. Her fashion photography is influenced by her art background, which allows her to create painterly, richly-colorful compositions that flirt with the surreal. In rock portraiture, Yelena has lent some of her fey charm to a number of celebrated performers, most recently former Hole bassist Melissa Auf Der Mau. In general, her still photographs seem to prefigure a tantalizing future by capturing moments in narrative time, and suggest a deep love for story-telling, as seen in some of her early work: the haunting silent movie/carnival imagery of Smashing Pumpkins' videos that she directed. For those who have been intrigued by her photography, this exhibition represents a special opportunity to glimpse the dæmons motivating the characters she has created on film. The series of works on paper reveals, in a more immediate way, the aesthetic that underpins the sensual, magical, and picaresque content of her photographic work.

Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D.
Director, Programs for Thought, Dactyl Foundation

Phenomena+Existence no. 1
October 5 - November 2, 2002
Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities

In the front hall of Yelena Yemchuk's exhibition at Dactyl Foundation are beautifully eerie female nudes, five large and eleven small works gracefully framed in matte charcoal. The triptychs seem to be about movement, like a bit of film. The diptychs experiment with depth of field and doubling. The single images are simply a moment arrested by thought, not frozen, but made alive by interpretation. These works would be the "phenomenal" part of the exhibition. Technically, the term phenomenon refers to a brute fact -- plain, indisputable. It is simply what you see, a spatiotemporal object of sensory experience susceptible to scientific description. But phenomenon can also mean the opposite, a marvel, a thing of wonder and amazement. The word provides a useful ambiguity that describes Yelena's work very well. Inhabiting each of these prints is what might be called a phenomenal pattern -- discrete, separate, and stubborn facts that, because they are put into relation, can be interpreted in extraordinary ways.

Photography is, in some sense, the craft of brute fact. Objects are captured on film. But Yelena's art takes objects into a space where things happen to them. Yelena attributes it to the spirit of the session that brings photographer, camera, and model together in the room and adds its own peculiar intention to the final image. Working in Polaroid 665 positive negative film, Yelena is able to change the body's textures and shades like a painter or a poet would.

In the main room is the part of the exhibition that focuses on some fundamental or first element of existence. The sixteen large unframed prints are raw, depicting carnival scenes, naked little kids at play, and a grave young woman holding a dead animal above her head. These pieces seem to show the world through the eyes of strangers. Yelena spent 1998-2002 working on a documentary "mission," possessed by that spirit perhaps, traveling from Eastern Europe, to Europe, to South America. She sought, found, and photographed strangers whom she recognized -- as contradictory as that may sound. Different as they were, each from each, they all had an odd nonlocal correlation. "They all knew why I was photographing them."

This is not reportage. This work is more psychological, as if the photographer had spend time talking to her subjects, but they wouldn't always have been able to speak the same language and they wouldn't always have been able to speak. But they are talking; that's clear; somehow they just seem to be talking. The overall effect is surreal. The link is implied, but where exactly is the connection? The viewer is drawn in, like the photographer herself must have been. It almost looks as if a stage has been set, inviting her to become the audience, but this is no performance. It is life, the strangest most contrived play there is. Yelena has found the principal players, and her photographs seem to give us some hint of the script.

--Victoria N. Alexander

Born in Kiev Ukraine, former Soviet Union
1990s Parsons School of Design, New York, NY majoring in fine art and graphics
1990s Art Center, Pasadena, CA, majoring in photography

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2002 "On Phenomena+Existence no.1," Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities, New York, NY
2001 "No Vacancy," Eastwick Galley, Chicago, IL
1995 "Ipolits Dream," Swell Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Selected Group Exhibitions
2004 "Strictly Visual" Lois Lambert Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2003 "all in lowercase" Australian Centre of Photography, Sidney, AU
2002 "Duel Eye Tour," Sotheby's, New York, NY
1997 "Images of Maritime in Photography," G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1996 "The Presence of Grace," Seven Sanctuaries Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1995 "The Year of the Women," El Pueblo Gallery Los Angeles, CA
1994 "Prognosis," Radost Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic

Publications
Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, Valerie Steele, Editor (Charles Scribners)
Visionaire 41 (World)
Vaugh Oliver Visceral Pleasures (Booth-Clibborn Editions)

Collectors
The Assa Family
Carol Cole
Jason Dill
Michael J. Dill
Pilar Demann
Steve Golen
Stacey Lefton Glick
Dorothy Hersey
Marianne Faithfull
Frank Mancuso Jr.
Bonnie Winston
Julia Reed
Paul Lewakowski
Corinne Karr
Jeannette Barry
Camell Ehlke
Julie Zeger
Jane Bradbury

Album Covers
2000 "Machina / The Machine of God" by Smashing Pumpkins, EMI Int’l/Virgin Records, Art Director
1998 "Adore" by Smashing Pumpkins, Virgin Records, Art Director / Designer / Photographer
1997 "Beauty Process: Triple Platinum" by L7, Warner Brothers, Photographer
1997 "Savage Garden" by Savage Garden, Sony, Photographer
1996 "Pleasure Club" by James Hall, Geffen Records, Photographer

Music Videos
1996 "Thirty-three" by Smashing Pumpkins, Virgin, Director
1996 "Zero" by Smashing Pumpkins, Virgin, Director

Reviews
Newcity Verve.art March 8, 2001 "Tip of the Week: Yelena Yemchuk," by Michael Weinstein

Working on visual inspirations about them, Yelena Yemchuk summons friends to her studio at all hours and has them engage in intense gestural activity before her camera. A romantic of the wild sort, Yemchuk's black-and-white female nudes are thoroughly Contemporary-all motion, without a trace of sculptural repose, like the freest of modern dancers frozen at moments of heightened expression, as though they could be models for statues. Breaking with familiar conventions, Yemchuk elicits neither the seduction of the traditional nude nor the anguish of the feminist portrait, but gives play to her subjects'own affirmations of their healthy and dynamic sensuality. Yemchuk's hallmark is athletic attitude, shown best in Laugh of a Shadow, where the subtly blurred subject bends powerfully forward as she raises her hand in a gesture of determined affirmation.

Artnet August 2002 "Weekend Update," by Walter Robinson

While we're on the subject of Sotheby's non-auction-related exhibitions, let's mention the small gallery show of photographs by Melissa Auf der Maur, the former bassist with the rock groups Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, and Yelena Yemchuk, a rock photojournalist who has also done album covers and promotional work. Both young women are accomplished photographers, though apparently with limited experience in the professional art world (all of the photos are owned by the photographers themselves).

Their subject matter is largely their own lives on the rock-star tour. Both present pictures of stadiums full of fervid fans, views out airplane windows and down vacant hotel hallways. Auf der Mar uses color, and often takes remote-control self-portraits of herself in performance. Her sensibility is fairly upbeat, as demonstrated by a grid of nine images of avid fans titled The Kids Are Alright, U.S.A.

Yemchuk, who makes black-and-white prints, has a slightly darker and more melodramatic sensibility. Thus, there are images of disturbed-looking rock stars -- Courtney Love, Billy Corrigan, Marilyn Manson -- and abject situations, like a shot of a girl's feet wearing only one shoe in a dirty outdoor toilet. In contrast, Yemchuk is also drawn to the rock picturesque, with pictures of a white horse in a field by the road and a brooding figure (that looks like the bald Corrigan) posing by a stormy sea.

All this material is drenched in fashion and glamour, and it's the dumb photo collector who doesn't whip out his checkbook and buy the whole lot.