YVETTE DRURY DUBINSKY
Artist Statement
My work has long been inspired by a fascination with various forms, colors, and lines (often maps of old cities), as well as the interactions of shapes. My internal reactions to life’s experiences are another muse. Much of my work is guided by a desire to make sense out of what is bothersome or upsetting, on the one hand, or what is astonishing and wonderful on the other. Working with color and form calms me. I use a variety of materials (usually but not always made of paper) and processes (including printing, painting, alternative photography, and collage) to investigate and articulate feelings—feelings that are not always clear to me at first. Meditations sometimes express themselves in complex compositions.
My recent inspiration has come from small paper and cardboard boxes: their shapes, their textures, and their heft. I take them apart and use them as templates, stencils, printing plates, or substrates for painting. I put what I make together, often combining the original boxes with the resulting prints to create new forms.
For more than ten years, I have been making work about the civil war in Syria, a place where I had traveled and developed friendships in late 2009. Drawing connections between the situation in Syria and the bombing of Spain in World War II as depicted in Picasso’s anti-war painting Guernica, I created the installation From Aleppo to Damascus in 2013.
Inspired by my own family’s migration from Europe to the United States, my work seeks to seed connections between crises of displacement in Africa, South America, the Middle East, and Europe. Forced to leave their homes by war or lack of opportunity, these migrants were represented in my 2016 work by silhouetted figures walking in circles, searching for places to settle or find shelter. Other works use maps of pertinent cities such as Aleppo, Paris, New York, San Francisco. I have spent time in these places.
I have continued to replicate this imagery—of migrants and maps—in my most recent work using boxes. Many of these boxes are used to store or transport consumer goods such as medicine and art supplies. Typically, the boxes are not seen as useful in themselves, and are usually disposed of or destroyed. But I became curious about their engineering, as well as their ultimate shapes. When opened, flattened, abstracted, and divorced from their original function, they not only provide an interesting substrate shape for painting and printmaking, but also recall the built world humans have constructed and are now destroying. War and natural disasters have destroyed countless homes, leaving humans without shelter. I now see a connection between my work with boxes—which are themselves shelters for goods—and my investment in exploring stories of migration and displacement. My experimental practice of layering, painting, and printing with the boxes has proven meditative, providing me with a sense of solace while chaos rages on outside of my studio and peace continues to evade.
Past Solo Exhibitions: Searching for Peace, 2022 Steamroller Collaborations, 2019 ON THE MOVE, 2016
Tondos, Tornadoes, Torpedoes, 2015
Past Group Exhibitions: please come flying, 2o22 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