YVETTE DRURY DUBINSKY
Artist Statement
A fascination with organic forms, lines (often maps of old cities), and shapes have been a significant inspiration for my work over time, while my internal reactions to life’s experiences are another muse. My work seems to be an attempt to make sense out of what is bothersome or upsetting, or on the other hand, what is astonishing and wonderful. The working itself calms me. I use a variety of materials and processes to investigate and articulate feelings; feelings not always clear to me at first. Meditations sometimes express themselves in complex compositions.
Before the summer of 2014, I had been making work about the chaos that was beginning to take place in Syria, a place where I had traveled and had gotten to know people in late 2009. In 2013 I created an installation (From Aleppo to Damascus) comparing the situation in Syria to Picasso’s “Guernica”.
Inspired by my own family’s migration from Europe to the United States and by the increasing numbers of people who have left war torn countries or places of little opportunity, I found myself deeply concerned with the migration crises in general, out of the Middle East, Africa, Myanmar toward safer places and with the migrations that occurred for African Americans described so beautifully in The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. I am repeatedly concerned with situations in which there are thousands of people who are forced out of and away from their safe spaces, their homes, and often who are unable to settle anywhere. They are even unwelcome where they can go. This was especially true for Africans, people from the Middle East. In 2016 I had them walking in circles, searching.
In 2020, 2021 and 2022 there has been (and still is) the pandemic and with it huge social change. Lives were and are still being lost to it, our language morphed as we needed new words to describe it and its accompanying political turmoil. And then a new war.
Now, in 2022 so many Ukranians’ lives are either ended or disrupted. I have witnessed these cycles repeat.
The meditative, layered, painting I have been doing and experimentation with new materials has provided me with some sense of solace while the peace outside my studio is evasive.
Past Solo Exhibitions:
Steamroller Collaborations, 2019 ON THE MOVE, 2016
Tondos, Tornadoes, Torpedoes, 2015
Past Group Exhibitions: 23°47', 2°27', 2°51', 2021 SYMPOIESIS, 2020 (s)(o)(f)(t) (w)(i)(n)(d)(o)(w)(s), 2020 Eleven x Seventeen, 2019 NADA House, 2019
Women On The Line, 2017
Who Cares?, 2017
Cooperative Consciousness, 2016
Razzle Dazzle, 2016
A.I.R. ReFreshed, 2015
Unframed, 2015
Wish you were here, 2015
If These Walls..., 2014
Wet Paint, 2014