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Inman Gallery is pleased to present Yevgeniya Baras and Julia Haft-Candell: Parts of Speech, a two-person exhibition featuring paintings by Baras and ceramic sculpture by Haft-Candell. The exhibition will be on view from Wednesday, November 12 through January 30, 2021 and is accompanied by a brochure with essay by Clare Elliott, Associate Research Curator at the Menil Collection, Houston.
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Parts of Speech brings together a sculptor and a painter whose working process is intuitive and whose tactile abstractions straddle the symbolic and the mystical. Baras' paintings are assembled, with new elements and layers added over time, resulting in idiosyncratic objects with strong bas-relief textures and sumptuous surfaces. Haft-Candell's ceramic sculptures marry two surface treatments: one, unglazed black clay with a white slip into which the artist has carved a woven sgraffito motif, and the other, layers of glaze over organic forms. Seen together for the first time in Parts of Speech, the artists' parallel approaches are made clear. Additionally, Haft-Candell's sculptures bring out the objecthood of Baras' paintings, and Baras' paintings invite closer inspection of the surface treatments and undulations of Haft-Candell’s sculptures.
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"...Yevgeniya draws heavily on the palette and character of Old Russia through her stylistic references to Russian icon painting and lubki prints while placing them in a dynamic context".
Lubki (singular lubok) - woodblock prints which served as folk literature in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Russia. They decorated the lower and middle classes homes as a substitute for more expensive painted wooden icons.
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"I begin with drawings. They are often quick and they serve as kind of demarcations of locales, determining where potential events may live. The events may be a flock of brush strokes, or a set of symbols, or a word. And then it is intuition, experimentation, listening to the work, responding and reining it in until it becomes something that has a sound. That can take a decade or 2 years. In my experience my work cannot leave my studio for the first year of its existence. During that year we are still in a very close conversation and it has needs only I can fulfill. After that it can enter the world."
- Yevgeniya Baras
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Yevgeniya Baras (born Syzran, Russia) is a painter working in New York, NY. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, as well as two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania: a BA in Fine Arts and Psychology and an MS in Education in 2003. Baras has received several awards, including a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018), a Chinati Residency in Marfa, TX (2018) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019).
Yevgeniya currently teaches at RISD and Sarah Lawrence College.
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"In 2017, I created The Infinite: Glossary of Terms and Symbols, an ongoing, illustrated guide that describes the personal and political symbolism for each recurring character in the infinite. The glossary entries—such as Legs, Combs and Arches—communicate an ideology focused on movement, shape-shifting and the body. Many of the terms have roots in traditional craft activities, such as Knots, Weaving and Braiding. Each definition I write asserts that they have multiple, often paradoxical, identities; they are not fixed nor easily defined, and can occupy several positions without hierarchy."
- Julia Haft-Candell
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the infinite: Glossary of Terms and Symbols
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"The shapes and characters of the infinite develop intuitively: I sketch imagery directly from my unconscious; when a specific form recurs I take note, develop a definition, and make a sculpture. I use clay, which is fluid and moldable in its wet state, but fires to a hard permanence, creating lasting monuments for each concept. The material responds physically to varying speed in touch, and has limitless possibility in terms of finish."
- Julia Haft-Candell
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"Challenging binaries is a common theme throughout my work. It comes up often in the Glossary referring to gender, but even the way I work with clay is binary based. Within each piece there is quickness and gesture as well as slow and methodical carving. Through the infinite and building my own vocabulary, I’m questioning the way humans create systems as a way to make sense of the world. I want my work to show how necessary but also arbitrary and often damaging these systems can be."
- Julia Haft-Candell
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Julia Haft-Candell (born Oakland, CA) is a sculptor working in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BA from the University of California, Davis, before graduating from the MFA program at California State University, Long Beach, in 2010. Haft-Candell was a summer resident in 2016 at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Madison, Maine, and has been awarded multiple grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation and most recently the California Community Foundation Fellowship in 2019.
Yevgeniya Baras and Julia Haft-Candell: Parts of Speech
Past viewing_room
