Media
Come, see me
A visual journal of 2022
I began the year by making collages representing personal and often ambiguous feelings on current events in my two widely different homelands, Kazakhstan and the US. Searching for scraps, shapes, and colors to capture this range of tangled emotions, I ventured into imagery and narratives from fairy tales and folklore to tell my own story. I found that the familiarity of those characters, grounding and inexhaustible in their interpretation, was the most genuine language to connect with others across international and linguistic borders. This visual journal is an invitation to a conversation between my creative process and myself.
Building Projects
Mark Jenkins, May 14
Four artists construct "UnFoldings"; Michael B. Platt layers people and places; Kathleen Callery and Marsha Staiger share color schemes; and Dairan Fernández de la Fuente dreams of travel
Judy Greenberg, untitled (Klagsbrun Studios)
AN ALTERNATIVE TITLE FOR THE GROUP SHOW AT KLAGSBRUN STUDIO might be "Repurposings." The four local artists represented in "UnFoldingS" dissect and reassemble boxes, books, and other artifacts, mostly made of paper. The results are complex and diverse, and often suggestive of earlier eras.
Curated by Vesela Sretenović, the exhibition begins conceptually with Julie Wolfe's "The Beholder," a wall-covering installation of pages from an art book she made in collaboration with writers and other artists. The book overlays fussy images from the Rococo era with text and colorful drips and splashes. Wolfe arrayed pages from the volume, apparently at random, and interspersed them with creased sheets of shiny gold paper. The single-color papers, bright and reflective, intriguingly interrupt the flow of printed pages.
The opposite wall is dominated by Enise Carr's "Tarp," a vast collage-painting whose richly textured expanse is divided by white gutters into segments, mostly equal-sized squares. Atop the weathered surface are fabric segments and bits of tape, distinct from and yet congruent with rest of the composition. Carr, who's also showing a sequence of battered near-orbs, pivots between order and chaos.
Sharapat Sarsenova Kessler is one of two participants whose style recalls Russian and Soviet Constructivism. Originally from Kazakhstan, the artist carves paper and cardboard into segments she uses to construct collages that include a puppet-like figure and a set of architectural arches, more impromptu than ceremonial. Inspired by her childhood exposure to quilt-making, Kessler builds things that seem as human as they are geometric.
There's also an echo of Constructivism in the 3D collages of Judy Greenberg, who served as the director of the Kreeger Museum from 1994 to 2017. She made three sets of stacked boxes, with Cubist-influenced drawing-collages pasted to their surfaces. While the box form is inherently tidy, Greenberg's approach is intuitive and emotional, notably in reaction to the current political situation. The mouth of a cut-together face spits a single expletive, small but potent. The country Greenberg observes seems to be not merely unfolding but unraveling.
From DisCerningEye, published May 14, 2025