Eureka Feels Strangely Like D�jà Vu
By Victoria N. Alexander
Yelena Yemchuk, "Dreamreader," works on paper Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities October 16 – November 30
Ukrainian-born Yelena Yemchuk has achieved no small success as a fine-art photographer. Her work prefigures a tantalizing future by capturing moments in narrative time, and suggests 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. Yelena is also a painter, and it is here that her narrative imagination is most revealing.
In visual language, animals are often symbolic of human traits: dogs for loyalty; cats for independence; mules for stubbornness. Yelena’s acrylic on paper compositions on exhibition at Dactyl Foundation tempt 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." Looking at her work is a little like looking at a lost civilization’s pictographs. You understand the meaning viscerally, but you cannot translate it into rational thought. Billy Corgan chose one of her paintings for the cover of his new poetry collection, Blinking with Fists. The images work well on a poetic level: they say more than they seem.
This series, entitled "Dreamreaders" makes the viewer realize that there is an empirical basis for the "gut feeling" or "intuitive" knowledge, which we hold in distinction to reason. There are different ways of knowing, knowing within the language center of the brain and knowing elsewhere, more immediately. It is an artistic ability that we all share to some degree. Think about walking through Grand Central Station, where countless people move in all directions. Your body is aware of whose pace is fast, who’s paying attention, who’s likely to suddenly change his direction. You know all this and can maneuver with ease even though you never say to yourself, "That man is about to turn left." We don’t 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 emotions.
An assiduous viewer of Yelena’s work will feel the meaning before she realizes it linguistically. Sometimes the body knows before the mind does, or so says recent research in neuroscience. Scientists monitoring brain activity can actually see the brain realize something before the subject is aware that she has done so. This is why eureka always feels strangely like d�jà vu. Yelena’s work conveys of this feeling of sudden enlightenment about human intentions while at the same time affirming the deeper knowledge that we feel we already or always knew.
