the Landing is pleased to present Labor, Mystery, Labor, Dream, our third solo exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Yevgeniya Baras.
Baras’ works present an alphabet of symbols—a code that invites a careful reading of each surface, and of her paintings as a group. Baras embeds items of personal significance within the layers of each painting as she is building it. Talismans, bedsheets, and remainders of meaningful occasions are hidden in her painting’s depths, and make themselves known as hillocks and ridges that create an active, rolling picture plane—a kind of landscape that contains geologic layers. These paintings, then, are always in relief: raised in ways that indicate that something is contained within them, but rife with a sense of the mystery of what that might be.
While Baras has always submerged items of personal significance within her canvases, some of the paintings in this new exhibition bring the artist’s personal ephemera to the surface of the works in the form of incorporated fabric from dresses worn by matriarchs of the Baras family, or by the artist herself. In numerous paintings, strips of fabric from several of these dresses constitute a border that surrounds the central painted area, serving as a container for the vibrant nature of the work within. This kind of interaction has always taken place in Baras’ paintings, but in the past, history was embedded within. Now the interplay between history and the new is observable.
Some of the works in this group are made on linen that does not end where the canvas ends, but instead creates what Baras calls a skirt, bringing to mind a bedskirt or clothing. Some paintings have raw edges that are frayed. Some paintings are affixed with colored thread that hangs downward from the canvas edge for several inches. Much attention is being paid to how each image is framed, and we are shown a great variety of framing options—including a traditional clean edge. “I think about borders when I think about frames,” says Baras, “borders have special meaning for me, as someone who immigrated.”
The exhibition’s title, Labor, Mystery, Labor, Dream, refers to Baras’ art-making practice. “In this title, I tried to acknowledge the process my whole being goes through to make work,” says Baras. “I was thinking about the studio, and how working opens up paths for new and interesting problems. But I also believe in inviting a mysterious event: a conversation with a friend, seeing something on a walk, reading, travel, walking through a museum and taking note of information I have not noticed before—that enigmatic connection that can feed into the work, or help the work, that could not have happened solely through the process of being in the studio.”
Many of the colorful, built-up surfaces of the paintings in this exhibition have been labored over for four years or more, and one has been in process for nearly eleven years. In all, this exhibition is the largest exhibition the artist has yet had in Los Angeles. It is not surprising, then, that the word “labor” appears twice in the show’s title.
This group of works includes silver paint, which is the artist’s nod to the decorative—and specifically, to jewelry. “I do think about dressing my paintings,” she says, “and jewelry seems like a natural aspect of getting dressed. That’s what I put on first in the morning. I appreciate its symbolic qualities, its craft, and its memorial qualities.” There is always a reference to the human form in Baras’ works—the painting’s bumps and ridges feel bodily, private, and vulnerable. Dressing these paintings as one dresses the body seems natural.
Baras worked on the exhibition’s paintings simultaneously, over the course of years, and imagined them being installed in close relationship on the wall, in a formation she describes as “a very long sentence of works—a string of ideas that would live very near to each other in the space.”
These are works Baras wants “to be considered as closely living neighbors,” she says. “All the works were being made at the same time. As in, I would work on some, and then turn around and work on others. They will be hung together, but they have coexisted all along.”
