NEWS

DRAWING A YEAR DAY BY DAY

For the past 6 months, Genie Poretzky-Lee has been working on her project: Drawing A Year, images are made to be shared, free gifts to whoever wants to request one. For more information visit www.drawing-a-year.com, or Instagram: drawing.a.year

DURGA - October 11, 2021
“O Goddess who resides in all creatures in the form of birth,
Hail to thee, hail to thee, all hail to thee!”

Maheshwari, the great mother of the Universe, appeared before them in all her glory. Her colour was dark blue the colour of eternal space. She had a hundred eyes, large and lustrous like blue lotuses and her breasts were round and elevated. She had four hands. On the right one hand held arrows and the other a lotus.

Durga is celebrated during the first nine days of the bright half of the lunar month of Aswin, in what we know as October.

TABLE - January 19, 2021

“We don't come to the table to fight or to defend. We don't come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or to stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for. The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children. We allow someone else to meet our need. In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel.”
Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

The drawings shown on the home page have a special place as a body of work amongst many other trends. They came spontaneously and are until today “outsiders” to what came later. They have not been seen before and I am excited to share them.

The above quote by Shauna Niequist sums it all up.

DECHIRAGES, Playing with shadows
November 20, 2020

“ la difference, disparition de la presence originaire, est a la fois la condition de possibilite et la condition d’impossibilite de la verite.” (Derrida, 1969: 210)
Explosive collages of torn paper fragments. These collages reflect a constant aspect found in my recent practice. They are directly unashamed using a gestural intervention, tearing a space/ paper-surface, disrupting the original recto-verso four sides bound paper sheet, into an unknown visual exchange, searching for self-justification, following an irresistible quest for “re-assembly”? No going back!

But to follow a flowing invisible gathering of fragmentation towards another visual reality away from the anonymity of the original blank paper into a more organic formation. This unpredictable visual ‘recycling ‘reflects a transition whereby the torn paper transforms and challenges new visual potentials.

Canopic Jars: the Afterlife of Matter
July 27, 2020

After a trip to Egypt in 2012, Genie Poretzky-Lee began a series of Canopic Jar sculptures (2012-2019). The glass jars, in various sizes and shapes, usually used for storage in the kitchen, became containers for an experimental process of growth and transformation. Similar to aquariums or terrariums, she filled each one with a substance and a catalyst. For example, in Canopic Jar #3 Hatching (2012- 2019), soil and a ceramic egg were the main contents and the condensation on the inside of the sealed glass jar, the catalyst.

For the full essay: http://www.thelearnedpig.org/canopic-jars-the-afterlife-of-matter/7600

MEMORIES OF THE NOW - June 24, 2021
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot “Little Gidding”

I recently discovered a cache of small forgotten drawings hidden away in a drawer from 1986-1987. Simultaneously, I have been following the impulse to work on large paper, perhaps a reaction to the small blue non-representational work from earlier this year. The language of the birds continues, while the reappearance of these old drawings seems to be recalling otherness.

They found their place as collages onto the work at hand. Little did I realize by doing this was like dipping into an ancient practice where scribes used to collate on their papyri various readings from other texts and in so doing provide a glimpse into the history of a continuous tradition.

THE ART GAME - April 8, 2021
As humanity is subjected to a recent and unusual state of living, it seems time to reassess my art game, observe and try to clarify its participation or negation of an ever-increasing number of creative endeavours streaming through the public media and through any other available opportunity.

This brings me to explore recent personal visual possibilities. These are mostly stimulated through narrative engagement with an active ‘ hands-on’ art practice often inspired by myth - a transpersonal intent fulfilling the personal as the personal is fulfilling itself. It is a professional call that does not require expertise. For myself, it mostly means empathy to a personal aesthetic.
Some of the latest images address Shards or Fragments (sample virtually exhibited by PRAGMATA COLLECTIVE April 2021).

https://pragmatacollective.co.uk/OpenFragment.html

“I READ THESE LINES AND I DREAM OF THE FIRE BETWEEN TWO BEES:
TWO BEES, STICKY AND GOLDEN WITH POLLEN AND HONEY
ARE LIFTING THE COMB, LIFTING THE EARTH FROM DEATH.”
Cecilia Vicuña

Homage to Cecilia Vicuña
The artistic expression of Cecilia Vicuna offers the landscape of her broad horizon; poetry, performance, installations, drawing and paintings.
Born in Chile, she is earthed in her Gender and in the land and story of her people.

We share a fascination for ‘thread’, and a love for ‘words’.

Following my recent participation in the virtual exhibition, ‘The Colour of Pomegranates. Part 2, the digital space’, red and red are now a new encounter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL_7MDuT8Xk&t=326s

The Colour of Pomegranates, Part 2.
October 6, 2020

The present COVID pandemic sweeps the debris of habitual living into confinement thus separating tactile feelings, sanitising creative practices facilitating a virtual reality as compensation for the lack of somatic experiences. These are the conditions now prevailing during a visual collaboration ‘The Colour of Pomegranates, Part 2’, between Rosalind Wilson, Anna Walker, and Genie Poretzky-Lee presently exhibited at Digital Artist Residency following a past installation having taken place in 2018 at The Lotus Studio, London.

My personal participation in this digital experience has shocked a familiar fine art practice into a large dose of technical anxiety, deeply felt at a personal emotional core. Like free fall into endless ‘Cyber Space’…

While observing this pomegranate bleed profusely into its own image, losing flavour and scent, becoming a ‘memory image’. I have chosen to retrace her memory through historical time to compensate for the inerrant rapidity of the digital media, holding on to colour, as a more reliable transferable truth.
Her juicy RED is dropping into dangerous red absent-presence, releasing through this process, limitless pulsating colour, over digital images while coaxing a narrative to surface over time-space onto a screen. Pomegranates have been celebrated throughout the ages. Exploring fragments of these records has helped me find a safety net across the challenges of an unfamiliar media with unexpected surprising interest and excitement.

Between London and India, 2016

I bring together disparate materials, salvaged objects that are already in existence in one form or another. My work represents layers of multiple histories, stories from the ancestors that travel forward as well as backwards. My interest in shamanism informs both the making of the work and the work itself, a natural philosophy invoking a primordial and natural world where life is harmonious.