Reflective Realities

Reflective Realities is a duo exhibition of works by two artists from New Zealand: Jude Broughan and Justine Walker. Both artists reference personal experiences in their work. Broughan meditates on everyday behaviors and values, while Walker delves into the social and psychic condition of women. They use their art to address societal expectations and limitations. Broughan subverts product packaging and advertising, while Walker challenges societal norms surrounding gender, age, and family expectations. Incorporating elements of repetition and process in their work is something they have in common. Broughan’s Soapbox installation features repeated motifs and patterns, as well as multiples in the form of soaps and soap dishes, while Walker’s video works use repeated performative gestures. Both artists consider and react to their realities—Walker’s do undo redo installation speaks to the disenfranchised grief and shame associated with the experience of childlessness, while Broughan’s exploration of sustainable living habits and consumer culture can be seen as a response to the environmental impact of human behavior.

Jude Broughan’s  Soapbox is part of her ongoing Personal Care series, which speaks about modifying everyday behaviors over time, i.e., finding small and large ways to live more sustainably. For this exhibition, Broughan presents three large mixed-media works that feature an enlarged template for a literal cardboard soapbox on actual pattern making paper, oaktag manila, with its distinctive weight and green tone. The exhibition also includes two limited edition screen prints, handmade ceramic soap dishes, two varieties of handmade soap, and a free handout featuring DIY personal care recipes. One print, Lemon Soaps Stack, is based on a photograph of the handmade soaps she and her twelve-year-old son have been making together. Strawberry Sundays is another print featuring the fruit popsicle her son made. The literal and figurative meaning of a ‘soapbox’ applies to Broughan’s work—a crate or box for packaging soap, but also to a physical or media platform which gives prominence to the person standing on it and the views they speak about. Soapbox goes beyond aesthetic experiences, aiming at sustainable living that begins in small ways—Broughan has been making her own deodorant and soap, among other personal care items, using organic materials that reduce the use of plastics and petrochemical substances. Broughan encourages visitors to join her activism in environmental justice.

Justine Walker’s do undo redo features works from For Sale: baby shoes, never worn, a body of work reflecting on her journey into childlessness. These works express the disenfranchised grief of not having much longed-for children. They use non-emotive references to missed birthday parties and bedtime stories, while being process driven to distraction. The works speak of the lengths parents will go to, to draw children into existence and the shame society projects on their failure to do so. Yet we witness Walker and her partner quietly reclaiming their dignity from this experience. Walker presents one photographic and three video works in this exhibition. Shame tryptic is a photographic work featuring three portraits of the artist wearing baby pink balaclavas, one revealing her eyes, one an ear and the last her mouth. do undo redo is a video work of the artists hand drawing squiggles in graphite. Filling the screen with scribbles only for the hand to un-draw the scribbles by reversing the footage and then redrawing them again. In the video work HAPPY the artist lights birthday candles spelling the word ‘happy’, we watch as they melt and fall setting alight the surface they are standing on. Balloons is a video work focused on the artist mouth blowing up different coloured balloons only to release them. We imagine childish giggles as we hear them emitting a wonderful farting noise as they fly from her grasp.

Artist Biographies

Jude Broughan is a Brooklyn-based New Zealand-born artist. She has had solo exhibitions at Marisa Newman Projects, New York; Benrubi Gallery, New York; Calder and Lawson Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand; Dimensions Variable, Miami; and Churner & Churner, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions and projects including at the MoMA Design Store, New York; Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami; Jarvis Dooney Gallerie, Berlin; Document, Chicago; Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland, New Zealand; Magnan Metz, New York; Dorfman Projects, New York; and the Essl Museum, Vienna. Broughan holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York, and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Yaddo residency. Her work has been discussed in Musée Magazine, Domino, Art in America, Blouin Artinfo, Collector Daily, Eye Contact, The Village Voice, and Whitehot Magazine.

Justine Walker is an interdisciplinary artist living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has an MFA and was awarded Massey Scholar from Massey University, New Zealand. She recently completed the NARS Foundation International Artist Residency in New York, with support from the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. She has had solo shows at both public and artist run spaces including at Toi Tauranga Art Gallery, Tauranga, NZ; FELTspace, Adelaide; play_station, Wellington, NZ; SEVENTH, Melbourne; Toi Poneke, Wellington, NZ; and Blue Oyster, Dunedin, NZ. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at NARS Foundation, New York; Whakatane Museum & Arts, Whakatane, NZ; A.I.R Gallery, New York; Meanwhile, Wellington, NZ; Enjoy, Wellington, NZ; City Gallery, Wellington, NZ; and The Engine Room, Wellington, NZ. Following an interest in female subjectivity, Walker uses repetition, performance and lived experience to produce video and photographic works that are performative in nature, with themes of longing, loss, acceptance, and family.

ART LAB of Amelie A. Wallace Gallery and the Social and Environmental Justice Institute (SEJI) at SUNY Old Westbury is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, Resilience: Two Ukrainian Women Artists. Co-sponsored by WGSS (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), the show features selected works by two Ukrainian women, video artist, Zinaida (b. 1975, Kyiv, Ukraine) and painter, Iryna Maksymova (b. 1991, Lviv, Ukraine) who are presently living amid air raids and frequent disruptions of electrical power, heat, and water supply. Focused on images of women, the works portray female protagonists as defiant figures of strength, independence, and resilience. Expressed in various media, Zinaida and Maksymova explore traditional Ukrainian motifs as vehicles of preserving and representing national identity, power, and endurance in the face of physical danger and the threat of losing their motherland.

Zinaida focuses on the peculiarities of femininity and traditional culture, the diversity of authenticity and modernity, transformation of the ancient into the modern and, the integration of sacred and mystical themes. For this exhibition, she presents two video works and two photographs. The main video, Mute (2015), offers silent portraits of female Ukrainian Maidan Protest volunteers during Euromaidan, the civil struggle of the winter of 2013/2014. The most significant historical event prior to the Russian invasion of 2022, it made a lasting impact on the formation of Ukraine’s contemporary national identity. Zooming in on the faces of female volunteers, such as a nurse, a rescue worker, and a journalist, Zinaida reveals in subtle detail the otherwise silent, stoic protesters’ emotional expressions against the tumultuous background. The women’s defiant and resilient expressions make the work timeless. In Transformation (2012), Zinaida explores the rich layers of lived experience inherent in Ukrainian cultural codes, asking the eternal questions of the meaning of human existence. Often juxtaposing renewal vs. death as two symbolic elements on a split screen—egg vs. dried fruit, hand vs. foot, white veil vs. black veil—the video appeals directly to our senses. Charged with symbolism, colors play an important role: white, black, and red may suggest purity, austerity, and passion.

Iryna Maksymova works primarily in figurative paintings and collaged quilting textile. Masymova is influenced by the early 20th Century Ukrainian avant-garde—Neo-Primitivism in particular—as well as by the brightly colored, whimsical, and fantastical works of Ukrainian self-taught female artists such as Mariya Prymachenko (1909–1997), who became an icon of Ukrainian national identity after a Russian attack destroyed some of her works at a museum.  Maksymova’s work also references Eastern European street art, as reflected in her bold marks, graffiti tags, spray paint, and energetic scribbles and hand-drawn Gothic letters. Her vocabulary builds on the visual and literary tradition of Ukrainian folklore and “naïve” narratives of self-taught folk painters. For this exhibition, she presents several paintings from her Motherland series and one textile work. Reminiscent of Expressionism, Masymova work revolves around energetically brushed female nudes largely devoid of anatomical accuracy, proportion, or three-dimensionality. She considers these monumental women to be “symbolic of the strength and resilience of a nation.” Other frequent motifs are animals, such as dogs, horses, tigers, dolphins and firebirds. The artist sometimes presents these figures as protectors of the people and land, while at other times as saints and warriors. Unlike her figurative paintings on canvas, Maksymova’s textile work, Blue and Yellow 2 (2023), reveals abstract qualities where patches of blue and yellow fabric are harmoniously sewn together, evoking nature while also representing the colors of the Ukrainian flag, thereby reflecting the artist’s patriotic devotion.

Artists Biographies

Zinaida (Zinaida Kubar, b.1975, Kyiv) lives and works in Kyiv. She graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (BA in Art and Art History) in 2017, and earlier, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (BA in Psychology) in 2009. She is a member of the Food of War International Community. In 2015, Zinaida was a project facilitator for Marina Abramovic In-Residence (Kaldor Public Art Project, Sydney, Australia). She is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and the Con Artist Residence (2018–2019, New York). Long an activist for the equal rights of women, Zinaida is known for her multifaceted works, videos, installations, performances, paintings, and decorative arts in which she explores folk life and creativity in the 21st century. She has created over fifty videos, three-hundred canvases, and more than one-hundred art projects in cinema, theater, modern ballet, music, fashion, and NFT.

Iryna Maksymova (b. 1991) was born and raised in Kolomyia, a small town in western Ukraine. In 2013, Maksymova graduated from the Graphic Design department of Lviv Polytechnic National University. She began her artistic journey in 2020 with her first solo exhibition in Lviv. Since then, she has participated in various group shows in her native Ukraine, Europe, Asia, and North America. Maksymova held solo exhibitions in London, Berlin, and Lviv. She also participated in group exhibitions in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Madrid, Beijing, and London. She currently lives in Lviv, Ukraine.  

The ART LAB and SUNY Old Westbury Social and Environmental Justice Institute

ART LAB is collaboratively operated by the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery and the Visual Arts Department of SUNY Old Westbury. Founded in the context of SUNY Old Westbury Social and Environmental Justice Institute (SEJI), which embodies SUNY Old Westbury’s historic and ongoing social justice mission, it is housed on the lower level of Residential Hall 1. SEJI is a living-learning environment that enhances student education through civic engagement and applied learning, thus sustaining initiatives for social justice locally and abroad. ART LAB focuses on interdisciplinary exhibitions, performances, and creative activities that draw attention to social and environmental justice issues while creating opportunities for professional artists, students, and faculty to display their work.

SAPAR Contemporary Gallery in New York City provided invaluable assistance with transporting the artworks and facilitating communication with the artists. 

ART LAB at SEJI (Social & Environmental Justice Institute), Room 106 and 107, Woodlands Hall 1, SUNY Old Westbury, New York 11568

www.amelieawallacegallery.org, www.oldwestbury.edu.