Petroukhina Explores Emotions Toward Personal Spaces in 'Defining Home'
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ASC Curator Chaney Jewell (left) and Visitor Relations Coordinator Matthew Howard install Yelena Petroukhina’s painting Elevation of Minute in the William H. Kennedy Jr. Gallery on April 6. Defining Home: Mixed Media and Ceramics by Yelena Petroukhina is on view from April 8 through July 10, 2021.
Mixed Media and Ceramics Exhibition Opens April 8 with Drop-In Reception
In The Arts & Science Center’s latest exhibition, Yelena Petroukhina explores the complex ideas of home and comfort and incorporates physical, emotional, and spiritual qualities within personal spaces.
Defining Home: Mixed Media and Ceramics by Yelena Petroukhina is on view in the William H. Kennedy Jr. Gallery from April 8 through July 10, 2021. This exhibition is sponsored by Simmons Bank.
Visitors may meet with the artist to discuss her work during a drop-in reception from 5–7 p.m. Thursday, April 8.
The opening of Defining Home marks the first opening reception at ASC in more than a year. With Arkansas’s COVID-19 cases dropping and the lower numbers remaining steady, ASC is resuming much of its in-person programming but with health precautions still in place. Masks are required and capacity for the galleries is limited to 40. Visitors may take on-the-go complimentary snack packs.
Petroukhina explores her ideas of home with two-dimension and three-dimensional work — the exhibition includes 21 paintings and mixed-media works, and two dozen ceramic pieces.
Krasina St. 6 (left) and Monochromatic Rainbow. Black 3 are just two of Yelena Petroukhina ceramic pieces on display in Defining Home. (Photo courtesy of Yelena Petroukhina)
Defining Home allows visitors to reflect on the relationship they have with the space they occupy, in whatever form that takes, said ASC Curator Chaney Jewell. “Many American’s spent the majority of 2020 in their homes. Was your home a shelter, a place for comfort, or a place of turmoil? What defines your home, space itself, or the emotions you carry into and allow to occupy the space?”
In her sculptural work, Petroukhina uses clay to build simple house forms.
Conversation 2, Living Room Series, mixed media, 18” x 24” (Photo Courtesy of Yelena Petroukhina)
“I explore the complexity of feelings and emotions we have towards our homes, she writes in her artist’s statement. “One’s home contains a vast landscape of emotions. I create forms easily recognizable as houses, like the ones a child would draw, a peaked roof and four vertical walls. Viewer instantly knows my work is about a sense of home. I begin with a foundational idea of what home is and refine and reimagine it based on experience and self-discoveries. I draw and print on the clay surface to create transparent layers. I add clouds, rain, rays of sun, and different colors of rainbows to show the complexity and fleeting nature of feelings. The layers of colors, patterns, and images refer to the layers of emotions and individual experiences toward and within their home.”
Her mixed-media work is an investigation of our sense of comfort within the personal space of our homes. Petroukhina uses found objects, Victorian wallpaper, and painted paper to construct the room around the figure.
“I cut and rearrange a patterned paper to give a sense of being interrupted and reassembled,” Petroukhina said. “Just as we rearrange and reimagine our homes as physical embodiments of our evolving mental landscape. I find the physicality of the process of creating this series to be a meditation on the understating of the personal space as a result of the personal experience. The figure is nude just as one should be completely him/herself and comfortable within one’s home.”
Petroukhina was born and raised in Bryansk, Russia. She lives in Little Rock, where she teaches art at Horace Mann Middle School. She is an alumna of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
For more information on Petroukhina, visit her website: yelenapetroukhina.net.
Yelena Petroukhina’s Landscape in Blue is one of the many ceramic pieces in “Defining Home.”
Ceramics Workshops
Petroukhina will lead special ceramics workshops this summer at ASC in conjunction with her exhibition. The workshops will be held June 28–July 2, and July 5. A summer camp for ages 12-17 will be held from 1–4 p.m., with a separate workshop from 6–8:30 p.m. for adults.
The workshops will be held in ASC’s new The ARTSpace on Main facility at (623 S. Main St.)
Students will learn fundamental clay hand-building techniques, surface and mono-printed image transfer techniques on clay, use of commercial glazes, and an introduction to kiln use.
During the first session, Petroukhina will lead a discussion of the idea of home and how she approaches the topic in her ceramic work. Participants will be encouraged to formulate their own idea(s) of home and convey them through the construction of a hand-built house, inspired by the pieces featured in Petroukhina’s exhibition.
Register for the youth summer camp here.
Register for the adult workshop here.
