10/23/2024
The Sam Francis Gallery at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences Presents
UNFOLDING ARCHIVES
The exhibition features work by 2024-25 Artist-in-Residence Jenny Yurshansky
Exhibition: Oct. 23-Nov. 14
Artist Reception and Workshop: Wednesday, Oct. 30, 3:30-5:30 p.m.
The reception does not require an RSVP. During regular gallery hours, please make a reservation in advance using this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeaRfOm5QeRgh0Ha1J-FcPGmoMWIZOYdxKWegGovc78bjRU3Q/viewform?usp=send_form
SANTA MONICA, CALIF. (Oct. 14, 2024)—Jenny Yurshansky is the 2024-25 artist-in-residence at Sam Francis Gallery. Her history of being a refugee deeply informs her artistic practice. Through a research-based approach, she explores the trauma of displacement, interrogating notions of belonging and otherness within the frames of landscape, historical documents, and social constructs. Formally, this manifests as absence, loss, and erasure. Her long-term projects form intertwined narratives and span the mediums of sculpture, photography, installation, and writing.
Yurshansky’s residency, “Unfolding Archives,” is a collection of work anchored by Unfolded Narratives, a 100-foot-long quilted tapestry art installation created during community workshops with over 300 participants for the past two years at the Wende Museum, Heart of Los Angeles, 18th Street Art Center, Roxbury Park Community Center, Camp Gesher, Chapman University, USC Roski School for Arts, Westridge School, Shalhevet School, De Toledo High School and Milken School. During the opening reception, Crossroads will host a similar workshop for visitors to work with Yurshansky, encouraging them to explore their family origin stories by creating paper fortune tellers. The session is an opportunity to focus on the complexity of what it means to think about home, origin, and place, especially in the context of one’s family history. How are the patterns that reveal themselves in our family dynamics indicators of larger socio-historical patterns that we can identify or contextualize ourselves within? How can this be understood in the framework of immigration and displacement? These workshops are a means of experiencing how our stories are manifold and interwoven. As such, they offer us paths for understanding our individual histories and places of origin and how that impacts our sense of belonging and identity.
Crossroads Visual Arts students will have the opportunity to collaborate with Jenny during her classroom visits this winter by using her work, “The Fugitive Archive”, as the catalyst for their work. Yurshansky’s photographic lightbox piece resembles an airport x-ray, revealing a collection of personal objects made precious due to their emotional significance rather than their monetary value. They become the physical manifestation of generational memory. A selection of student work will be showcased in the student project exhibition in January.
Another component of “Unfolding Archives” is “Generation Loss”, a listening station with audio interviews of workshop participants describing their objects through storytelling. These interviews were recorded by Jenny and are archived as records on X-ray film, also known as “bone records” in the Soviet Union. Crossroads community members will have the opportunity to participate in the growing series, which will later be displayed in her solo exhibition, What We Carry, at the Skirball Cultural Center in October 2026. All participants will be credited as co-creators in the artwork. More information will be provided during the exhibition.
“Rinsing the Bones” is currently on display at The Wende Museum in Culver City in affiliation with Getty PST-ART.
“My reason for creating this work is to manifest a deeper understanding and point of connection from which all who participate and visit will carry their experience forward, making them part of a paradigm shift in future discussions they participate in. My work is iterative for this reason, generative and expansive in a way that includes the voices and experiences of participants and visitors so that our stories go beyond the space of the exhibition and their impact is carried out into those we interact with in our lives… I hope that we all find ourselves in constructive interference as we overlap rather than collide, centering our care for one another as we gently intersect.” – Jenny Yurshansky
