DATELINE NEW YORK: Holiday happenings in retrospect (01/12/03)

DATELINE NEW YORK: Holiday happenings in retrospect

by Helen Smindak

At the turn of the year, cultural events in the Ukrainian community dwindle down to a precious few as we go about celebrating one Christmas or the other (or both) and ringing in the new year with traditional "Malanka" festivities.

Yet there still remains much to write about, for the pre-Christmas period of 2002 was well stocked with art exhibitions and musical events.

Apart from the Ukrainian Institute of America's exhilarating "Renaisssance of Kyiv" events and an exciting Ukraine Day at the United Nations (see The Ukrainian Weekly of December 15 and January 5, respectively), December had many sugarplums to offer.

Included among these were "A Royal Christmas," a touring show starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, and featuring principal dancers of the Kyiv Ballet and the Shumka Ukrainian dancers of Edmonton; a duo-piano recital by Kyiv-born Valentina Lisitsa and her husband, Alexei Kuznetsoff; a Symphony Space concert headlined by master bandurist Julian Kytasty and virtuoso pipa (Chinese lute) player Wu Man; and a gig by the wild Gogol Bordello ensemble at the Knitting Factory.

Dovzhenko films took the spotlight for two weeks at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn. Capturing interest in Manhattan were exhibits by artist Inka Essenhigh and photographer Joseph Sywenkyj.

Highbrow cartooning

Inka Essenhigh, the progeny of a Ukrainian mother and an English father, has been making waves for several years as a stylish up-and-coming painter, but her English surname concealed her from "Dateline" until a Connecticut reader tipped us off to her part-Ukrainian lineage. Turns out Ms. Essenhigh enjoyed sudden fame four years ago, when critics and New York art dealers first discovered her "trendy" art.

Michael Kimmelman, who wrote about her latest exhibit in the November 17, 2002, issue of The New York Times, referred to her early work as "skillfully drawn, sinuous and decorative," populated by "humanoid techno-blobs that looked slightly sinister but also loopy." He says her new work, shown in tandem at 303 Gallery in Manhattan in December and at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, reveals a new phase in her still youthful career: she has evolved her own distinctive realm of "highbrow cartooning in a kinky style that is lush and louche."

Ms. Essenhigh's art, says Mr. Kimmelman, tests the always fine, fascinating line between beauty and bad taste as she "flirts brazenly with kitsch." One of her eight paintings at 303 Gallery showed a long-lashed vixen in delicate pink-striped harem pants, fanned by buglike slaves, reclining on a gigantic platform bed shaped like a tiered wedding cake. Another work focused on lovers shooting laser beams into each other's eyes while morphing into Art Nouveau entanglements of vines and budding flowers.

In her earlier work, Ms. Essenhigh used enamels that left a flat, glossy surface on the large canvases she uses; this past summer she switched to oils for a richer, tactile surface. Andrea Scott (Time Out New York) says the off-key palette and the imagery that hints at Mughal miniatures and Japanese ukiyo-e prints are still recognizably Ms. Essenhigh's, but she feels that old-fashioned paint and more familiar pictorial conventions constitute a brave move for a young artist who's garnered so much attention.

Writing in the November issue of ArtReview, Violet Fraser notes that Ms. Essenhigh's paintings omit facial details, as in the visually epic work "Rearing Horse and Rider" (2002). She says character and experience are given definition by the rodeo-style salute, the big boot firmly planted in a foregrounded stirrup and the drama of the rearing horse, swathed in streams of cloth and flying mane.

Steven Vincent wrote in Art & Auction that Essenhigh paintings such as the 2002 "Personal Planet" and "Arrows of Fear" strike our sensibilities "less as examples of hip '90s art and more as insightful ruminations for anxious times." He feels that Ms. Essenhigh's evolution toward a more confident, painterly style should solidify her reputation as a significant debut de siecle artist.

Most critics agree that Ms. Essenhigh's large paintings are vibrant, violent and shiny. The public must like them, for the work on view at the Miro Gallery was sold (at $30,000 to $35,000 a canvas) even before the exhibit opened.

Born in Belfont, Pa., Inka Essenhigh was named Ivanka by her parents, Anna (Kobrynskyi) and Robert Essenhigh, and affectionately dubbed Inka by her grandmother; the nickname stuck. She attended Ukrainian school in Ohio and worked at Soyuzivka in the 1980s ("I'm very conscious of my heritage," she told "Dateline.") Her art studies took her to the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio and New York's School of Visual Arts, from which she graduated in 1994.

In the next few years, Ms. Essenhigh tried various painting styles, realist and abstract, before settling on a style of her own, one that was influenced by artists like Dali. At the time, she was designing Sears boxer shorts on which images of simplified, generic space ships, cocktail glasses or aliens floated in front of flat monochrome grounds. The clear, bold language of the textiles appealed to Ms. Essenhigh and she tried to achieve that clarity and directness in her paintings, eventually developing her cast of heavily outlined, headless mutants, set in enigmatic scenarios before neutral fields of paint.

At 29, she shot to fame in 1998 after some critically acclaimed shows in New York. There were scads of reviews in leading art publications and the general print media. Her surreal canvases were snapped up by the Whitney Gallery and MoMA in New York, the Tate Liverpool in England and Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz, among others. A profile in Vanity Fair magazine established the petite, live-wire painter as a celebrity.

Now 33, and lately married, Ms. Essenhigh continues to work in her East Village studio, while her London exhibit travels to Edinburgh and the New York show goes on to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami. Critics are waiting to see what she'll come up with next. Says Ms. Essenhigh, "I think about (my paintings) as being about America: fake, fun, pop, violent but also quite attractive."

An open door

Joseph Sywenkyj, a young photographer who graduated from the School of Visual Arts with an Honors B.A. degree in photography last spring, has a mission: he wants to raise awareness of Ukraine's growing epidemics through photographs, searching at the same time for truth and hope in its various forms.

To this end, he has returned repeatedly to Ukraine, the land of his ancestors, to photograph Chornobyl radiation victims and citizens of Ukraine suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

"I think of the camera as an open door to bring me closer to the people I photograph," he says. "I am very concerned with fostering social change but work to represent the people in the images not only for who they are and how I see them, but for how they would prefer to be seen and represented."

Mr. Sywenkyj's exhibition "Joseph Sywenkyj Ukraine: Verses of Faith and Disease," opened at the Visual Arts Gallery in November and ran through December 14, 2002. Included were some 35 photographs taken in Ukraine over the past two years, among them shots of 6 and 7-year-old Chornobyl victims who seemed to carry the weight of adulthood on their faces, and photos from last summer's trek to several TB hospitals.

Guest curator W. M. Hunt, director of photography at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York, told opening night attendees that "Joseph Sywenkyj is the real thing: he has a good eye as a photographer, his sense of color and composition are remarkable, and he has enormous heart as a human being."

While Mr. Sywenkyj's striking exhibit covered the spread of tuberculosis, the centerpiece was his story about AIDS and its impact on Odesa residents Ira and Sasha and their newly born fifth child, Maria. Resisting despair, he included images showing the preciousness and vitality of life - Maria's sisters, Nadia and Tanya, skipping rope.

Mr. Sywenkyj's work is currently seen in a traveling exhibition "Pandemic: Imaging AIDS," which includes 100 works by major award-winning photographers and artists representing 50 countries, documenting 20 years of AIDS. On view in the United Nations Visitors' Lobby through January 20, the exhibit has already been seen in the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain, and will travel to Washington in the spring. The "Pandemic: Imaging AIDS" project includes a book that carries two of Mr. Sywenkyj's photos.

Mr. Sywenkyj's photojournalistic work, which has earned him several prestigious awards and grants, has been carried in U. S. News & World Report, Newsweek, Fortune, Guitar World, The Ukrainian Weekly and other publications.

That's entertainment!

At Symphony Space in early December, bandura maestro Julian Kytasty joined Wu Man, a virtuoso performer on the pipa (Chinese lute) for an evening of extraordinary and beautiful music. Ms. Man, who has performed and recorded with Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project and the Kronos Quartet, performed an opening solo set of traditional Chinese material. Then she and Mr. Kytasty combined talents (as well as a variety of banduras and flutes) in some newly arranged duets that drew on both Chinese and Ukrainian sources. Mr. Kytasty's colleagues from the Experimental Bandura Trio, Michael Andrec and Jurij Fedynskyj, came in for the finale, creating a foursome that produced unusual rearrangements of three numbers from the EBT Songbook.

With the "Sound of Music" co-stars Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer heading the line-up, the touring show "A Royal Christmas" came to Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, Long Island, for a one-night stand in December. The supporting cast included the 16-year-old Welsh soprano Charlotte Church and a slew of international choir singers and ballet and folk dancers, among them the world-renowned Shumka Dancers, an ensemble that's been compared to big-time Riverdance. The nostalgic Yuletide show featured three acclaimed ballet dancers from Kyiv - principal dancer of The Royal Ballet Ivan Putrov and principal dancers of the Kyiv Ballet Oksana Storozuk and Olena Filipeva - who performed beautiful ballet pieces from "The Nutcracker Suite."

Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall resounded with a Schubert piano duet and Chopin études on December 17, 2002, as Kyiv-born Valentina Lisitsa and her husband, Alexei Kuznetsoff, teamed up in a duo-piano recital. Ms. Lisitsa, who earned a scholarship to complete her studies at the famed Kyiv Conservatory at the age of 7, and her husband have won numerous prizes, among them the Lysenko Piano Competition and the Ukrainian Chamber Music Competition. Now a U.S. resident, Ms. Lisitsa has been enjoying a fast-growing solo career since making her U.S. debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival. She continues to collaborate with her husband, appears frequently with numerous chamber groups and has recorded seven disks for the Audiofon label.

Topping off their first North American tour, the giddy punk rock ensemble Gogol Bordello and its Ukrainian frontman, Eugene Hutz, returned to the Knitting Factory in lower Manhattan for the pleasure of fans who saw them kick off the tour at the Factory back in September 2002. Says Mr. Hutz: "Gogol Bordello is this thing where I can do acting and music writing and music performing and just really plain freaking out. Our music is radical and risky, but I think that's exactly what needs to be done now."

Helen Smindak's e-mail address is [email protected].

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