too much remembering, too much forgetting: drawing as metabolizing memory
March 25 - April 3, 2021
Reflektor Gallery, Užice, Serbia
Featured works suggest the understanding of fear and the healing process as integral to the resolution of conflict, whether internal or external. Bringing into the light the buried hurt of deeply intertwined cross-generational conflicts, feelings of safety, as well as guilt, raises for me the question of how much can an individual and collective body hold?
Architectural dreamscapes and open spaces are narrative containers which explore these relations. By using light and imitated vanishing points I strive to create illogical and almost theatrical disjointed spaces that I relate to as stories of no location, more imagined than actual realities.
Shift in scale turns intimate records into vast theatrical stages where stepping out of the light means stepping out of time, accepting the idea of a common future, the construct which Bogdan Bogdanović referred to as “indestructible joy of life”. Damaged structures signify entry points for a dialogue that calls for nurture and recovery with deep consideration of equal importance between processes of remembering and the ways in which we un-remember. Depictions of damaged buildings invite healing through deep examination of memory and ways of archiving, as the key factors in memory making. Through cyclical reviving and reprocessing of the past, the drawing becomes a memorial ground in which graphite trace inhabits what has been abandoned.
Using time and process as modes of expression, drawing reflects the complexity of transitional states accompanied by sincere need for reconnection which is inevitably fleeting. What stays portrayed is an interrupted habitat transformed by one’s own fears and desires. Safe ground to land on. Home.
Jelena Prljević
Our bodies hold and tell our stories.
They live through us as we live through them.
It is in this way that we pass down and inherit our stories.
Jelena Prijević’s large and small graphite and charcoal drawings, animations and animated projections seem to be looking for the source of some lived dream, building the scaffolding through which to view something perhaps forgotten, something what is known, deeply known. Preverbal. The drawings pick through the scattered rubble of the frames of a story, the walls of a building, the old tools left behind.
This is the work of a vulnerable, bold story teller willing to risk finding the story in order to see if it is true, not true, or both. The traveler that grazes back and forth between different times to try and tell a story while making marks here and there, in order that we might find a way home, or not get too lost along the way.
At the heart of her creative work is an inquiry into the fundamental dimensions of perception and imagination. Shifting perspectives that move through time and space. In a recent exchange, Jelena shared an experience that brought to life for me (Ray) the distinct way she continually examines everyday experience, and how this informs her art. The story involved a tractor ride in the Serbian countryside that iterates through time with a similar pattern. In the most recent iteration (summer of 2020) she is driving, while her father sits of the hood to keep the tractor from flipping on the steep terrain. A slight turn of memory, and it is her grandmother sitting on the hood with her father at the wheel, herself now a child, looking on while collecting hay.
When speaking about this experience, the artist says: “…this intertwining of times and perspectives I compare with the animating process where each frame gets made to inform a pre-imagined future we like to call movement. The nature of that "future" movement looks at the "present" frame as part of the series of events that inform each other in a specific way.”
We, as humans, string together discrete yet porous moments in time and space. We imagine and animate our experiences. Tens of thousands of years ago, the layering and smudging of animal images could be put in motion by the flickering of torch light. Such magic. Yet, representation has always been about what was paradoxically here and not here, at the same time. Stories get passed along and get told to us through generations of ancestors’ hands sifting soil, steering a tractor, picking plumbs, wiping tears, making bread. In this way, they tell us that they are all still here. The stories come and go, sometimes moving rhythmically like the breath, sometimes moving with fits of unimaginable eruptions, like mountains of inconceivability, surrounded by loss. Here in the rubble, face down on our bellies, we develop the eye and the courage to re-imagine, and tell the stories again. In this way, the restoring of an old beam of wood can become the basis of new story, a new structure, allowing the past and present live together.
Jelena’s work holds yearning for solid ground, the place to rest on the one hand, and the resistance to where she might be caught and held back on the other. This knowing serve as a reminder that it matters how we walk this earth whether or not we are willing to trust the journey. This is how she offers her and us a new way to begin to see, to know, to walk. A new way to live the story with more safety and grace, for all.
Ray DiCapua and Marie Pace
March 2021