emblems of the enigma

EMBLEMS OF THE ENIGMA
The Art of Vessna Perunovich

Curated by Donald Brackett

“Human blood is the ink of History…”
Robert Duncan, Poet


Sometimes, when we look closely at works of art, that is, when we let our senses do the thinking and our thoughts do the feeling, we can recognize art objects for what they really might be: intimate conceptual buildings designed by artists for us to live in briefly. Briefly, but also just long enough for them to alter our perceptions, and maybe our attitudes toward life, forever.
The subtle architecture of these temporary places functions as a private theatre providing an ideal opportunity to talk about time, passage, protection, transition, security, domestic life and safe places in general, since we all share such issues. Such insights into the nature of our reality are also exactly the purpose and function of the multi-layered art works which I have curated in this retrospective survey selection called “Emblems of the Enigma: The Art of Vessna Perunovich”.


Her compellingly beautiful paintings, sculptures, mixed media installations, videos and performances are mesmerizing in the manner they use to suggest and situate our experience of these very core elements of our existence. Her collective body of work, an impressive and internationally recognized one, is part of a personal narrative with broad cross-cultural implications, especially in the methods she uses to articulate certain key ideas relating to internal and external exile, time and identity, the body and its boundaries, the home.
There was a strange Medieval Latin term that seemed to presage her style of emotive measurement and representation: perturbationes animi, a term which includes all states of feeling and thought to which human beings are dependent on the outside world. Which is to say, that part of our experience which holds us ransom to the real world. But how does one express the enigma of this, our condition?
As if in response, the surrealist poet Andre Breton once remarked that “Painting, photography and sculpture are lamentable expedients for expressing the ineffable, but they will have to do until something better comes along.”
I would like to suggest that something better has come along: a format for the manifestation of art objects which combines and merges all the above disciplines, plus a few others. I am of course, referring to the methodology of mixed media conceptual installation, a format which also includes theatre, performance, video, poetry, even the very air we breathe while in the gallery or museum.


This multi-media and multi-layered format, as evidenced by Perunovich’s own subtle conceptual architecture, allows us to explore some of the more important themes facing all of us as we navigate into a new century and a new millennium. This is the century when all prior artistic formats must coalesce.
Perunovich has managed to accumulate a remarkable series of physical insights which clarify the relativity of our reality in a sometimes harrowing and often elegant manner. She has, in her work of the last nine years particularly, constructed a personal theatre which celebrates the temporary places she conceives and designs as part of her actively engaged aesthetic. Each installation is a temporary place providing a striking scenic stage for varied contemplations, primarily on the nature of mortality and human interaction. Each is an exploration of and elaboration on the solemn geography of human limits.
A piece such as “Soul Searching” for instance, from 2007, is practically a living lament to the limits of human consciousness: an apparently bloody book
which is the sole result of all our religious projections and their frenzied toll.
As well, each individual piece is a portion of a greater sequence, almost like a diagram or equation which leads the intrepid viewer to a grasp of some natural and supernatural law managing all behaviour, or even our thoughts about behaviour. In retrospect, and as the pieces themselves demonstrate, her oeuvre has been a past puzzle to be assembled in the future. In other words, here and now.


As such, her contributions to our cross-cultural dialogue are profound in their content and charming in their context: they present a museum of dreams for our consideration, dreams which are indistinguishable from the everyday life which appears to manufacture them.
The works in this survey exhibition, whether in the form of drawings, paintings, wall works, sculptures, assemblages, video projections, or performance, are all linked by one single thread that frays off into multiple directions : the subject of shelter.
In the 2006 “Puzzle Pieces ” series for example, there is a special kind of obscure homesickness at work: are we witnessing a nostalgia for the house we were born in, for the country we used to live in, or for a home we have not even yet discovered? The answer is: yes. And there is no nostalgia quite as poignant as the nostalgia for a future we innocently hope somehow to construct from our own origins.
The puzzle pieces in question evoke an existential homesickness, they are contour maps which feel domestic, with family dynamics often reflected in symbolic house and figure shapes, but their core message still seems to be the obscure nature of human identity, reduced to emblems which register as equations or diagrams of sanctuary.



This notion, explored in the exhibition through the use of several quite different pieces from different periods and in different media, is further attached to her profound grasp of the primal idea of haven, of protected enclosure, of treeless treehouses and fortifications, of childhood concepts for seclusion in the safe place.
In short, artworks that manifest not only a subjective structure but also a universal one which is part of our shared hardware. This intricate zone of intimacy is immediately played out in all of her works chosen for inclusion in this survey show. “Continuum”, from 2000, one of my favourite sculptures, is an ideal example, in three dimensional sculptural form, of something she often also mutually explores in what I can only call a four-dimensional format. It’s a diagram of time, not just passing but morphing before our eyes.
This four-dimensionality is sometimes literally expressed, as in those media of duration such as film, video or performance, as in the case of time-based pieces like “Hanging By A Thread” from the recent Story Girls exhibit, but it is equally explored in certain physical objects which are nonetheless sculptures in four dimensions, such as the highly mutable “Couples” (1998-2007), with its ever shifting allegiance to containment. Which is just another form of shelter, after all.





While literal in the “Continuum” emblem, with its child’s legs morphing into an adult’s boots, the continuum principle per se is metaphorical in many other works, such as the compelling performance piece she executed in London in 2003, “Transitory Places: I Hug The World and The World Hugs Me Back” (a piece which has surprising resonances with Joseph Beuys’ own “I Love America and America Loves Me”.)
Her performance piece and its documentation in photographs is essentially an exploration of thresholds: spaces between people which can easily be amplified into spaces between nations. Such spaces between countries are often occupied by the ghostly presence of exiles from either one or the other, or both.
It is also a tender if unsettling emblem for the relationship between an artist and the public which views her works. As a threshold dweller, she also aptly gives credence to what Arthur Danto once identified as the basic definition of the art object: it is an embodied meaning.
All Perunovich’s works are clear examples of embodied meanings. Embodiments of shelter, displacement and diffused family origins abound in her work. This is an exhibition which searches for the why hidden in the how: because after all, in the end, our whole world is merely an empire of exiles.
“Life isn’t one straight line. Most of us have to be trans-planted, like a tree, before we blossom…” the artist Louise Nevelson once observed, another expatriate sculptor who harboured a nostalgia for the future.
The notion that foreign rather than native soil is more fruitful for us is an
intriguing one, especially since it appears to run counter to our intuitions.
Perhaps it is more the case for artists, who owe an aesthetic allegiance as well as
an ethnic or political one, and perhaps artists are always inviting us, through
their work, to consider wider and less restrictive horizons than our meager
maps allow.
Perunovich’s emblematic objects and images chart a territory quite exclusive
of political or ethnic maps. They may be territories of desire, as suggested by a
recent piece’s title, but each one is also a threshold experience outside
cartography, and all it might take for us to enter these expanded territories is the
desire to do so.
We must pass through such a threshold just as we pass through our own bodies: in wonderment and awe. And the artworks which approximate our passage, such as one of the best examples of her allegorical thresholds, the 1998 piece called “Aftermath”, in which sculpture and pedestal dissolve into one another, and a single drop of textile blood travels downward to the gravity-laden floor, always suggest a solidified flow which is literally our history in transit, our experience turning into our identity, and our identity creating our relationships.
In this kind of simple yet staggering tableau, one typical of all her output, we can see the traces of what one historian once called empathic unsettlement, the ability to put oneself in another’s position without taking the other’s place. It sanctifies the sorrow of political or social displacement common to exiles everywhere, and accomplishes what Lynne Bell once termed an “engagement of the viewer’s empathic imagination”, thus creating a “political space for critical rememberance”. Such insights are both reassuring and disconcerting at the same time.
Other expressions of continuum, the most obvious one being the repeated use of crimson fabric which suggests to me that distressing ink of history, abound throughout her thoughtful oeuvre: there is a continuous thread devoted to contemplating sanctuary, domicile, the house, and most ironically, privacy in public. The proposed purpose of art, as I see it reflected in every piece this artist has produced since her arrival in North America back in 1988, is both simple and striking: art is a means of calculating the exchange value between spirit and matter. Just as money can be considered frozen desire, the collective bodies of work by Perunovich amount to frozen spirit. The currency of consciousness itself.
“Bloodlines”, the 2006 drawing installation consisting of a narrow, almost calligraphic scroll is the most tangible example. This distressing merger between poetry and science, with its endless paper coils of dripped and scratched vital fluid, is a veritable diagram of irony: the very substance which is the core of our genealogies, our own blood, is also used to write the history of our follies on the world stage.
Perunovich’s most recent video pieces both appear to quantitatively approach the subjects of construction and destruction, as well as the entropy of structure in general, including the structure of relationships.
In “Infinite Wall”, 2007, she is seen enacting a tranquil performance of assembly and unraveling, adding and subtracting a string-based sculpture on a blood-red wall , while softly humming the tune from Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy”. The task and the humming are one.
There is a striking set of visual and cognitive contrasts here which somehow manage to indict all of European history as a misadventure in mayhem concealed beneath romantic and heroic splendour. The building of walls becomes a metaphor for our entire place and role in the world, one self-evident especially in the recent history of Europe.
Meanwhile, in the video “Borderless”, also 2007, she and another figure traverse a passage that precludes meeting, they trace movements towards and away from each other before the same red wall, until they eventually meet and swoon away together in a surprisingly emotional climax. Her economy of means for conveying the feelings in such deceptively simple pieces is startling both for its austerity and its paradoxical impact on the viewer.



This is an artist who has long investigated the primal territory of the heart’s home. Her work dwells, emotionally and philosophically, on the subject of boundaries, both physical and psychic, and by yielding a shape to the invisible, she invites the viewer to dwell momentarily in their own safe place: a shelter bounded by the installation.
A shelter unbounded by the mind of the maker or the viewer; a shelter designating the territory which has no map, or is itself a map without a territory.
So it is with the construction of a conceptual building such as Perunovich’s overall body of work: a theatre for the elaboration of fleeting ideas that coalesce into an experience which is transitory, fragile, sensuous, and cerebral and yet nonetheless solid, actual and able to be occupied, briefly by our bodies, permanently by our minds, eternally by our spirits.
Some of the artworks in this survey selection strike me as being mental tattoos, which after all is just another way of appreciating the functioning of emblems in our lives.
If the visitor can slow down their visit, to a standstill if at all possible, they will come to appreciate the generous elegance and almost opulent splendour which has been devoted to making their brief passage through her installations a heartfelt one.



As a gifted artist with a compulsion to fully explore the limits and edges of her varied media, she has succeeded, by actually using Time itself as one of her raw materials, in building what the poet Goyen called a “house of breath”. She is interested in using the inherently narrative function of her art to create meaningful situations and appropriate symbols of our collective history.
An unavoidable part of that shared history is the violence of dislocation, the burden of displacement, the energy of exile, the politics of sustaining identity under threat; in fact the very conflict between the left and right sides of our brain which sentences us to life in the third dimension in the first place. Can we know more than what we think we know? Do we even know what we think? How do we reconcile the left side and right side of ourselves which causes the apparent battle between the arts and sciences?
How do we resolve apparently concrete duality itself? These are the perplexing questions her work offers to the thoughtful viewer. The works themselves are those questions. The answers, if there are any, are hidden inside each of us, in those damp places of ultimate exile.
With each new addition to her ongoing practice she has shown herself to be a unique kind of architect: designing and making buildings made of time, houses made of breath. She has persistently and consistently chosen to create emblems of the enigma. This is surely the subtle architecture of temporary places in action.

What is an emblem? Originating in the Middle Ages, when belief was
reinforced with behavioural modification, it is one of a number of symbolic
forms which bear witness to a systematic program of composing, compiling,
transposing and recording allegorical imagery.
Emblems, iconologies, symbologies, and systems of signification all share
something in common with each other and with visual artworks. They tell a
story, allegorically, visually and poetically. Most emblems originally consisted
of three portions: the lemma, or motto; an arresting visual content; and an
explanation of its meaning contained within its own structure. To that degree,
all emblems are signs in the formal sense, and as such, the artist featured in this
survey show produces an exemplary kind of allegorical sign, the structural
analysis of which using semiological methods reveals that her mixed media
works qualify as formal signs per se.
This is specially so since a sign is defined as consisting of the signifier and the
signified, and in the case of this artist, those elements are inextricably blended
and merged with the physical character of each piece of work. The signifier is
the art object, the signified is its meaning as perceived by the viewer.
In her most recent bodies of mixed media work, in my opinion also her finest to date, Vessna Perunovich continues a trajectory which explores a wide range of non-physical geographies, using a specific talent for feeling and projecting emotions which are available to everyone but which we only seem to fully recognize in the subtle otherness of formal artworks.
But regardless of the formal shape they take individually, her work as whole still conveys that startling continuity, and lends itself to the extended reverie of story-telling in order to assimilate the sustained state of intense focus and emotional rapture which runs across her entire artistic practice.
So it is that works from a decade ago manage to maintain their grip on the imagination. Works like “Tiny Deaths” and “Couples”, and “Splitting Up”,
all from 1998, share a certain vibration which is later elaborated and animated within videos, performances and other later sculptural objects. Yet each object, while also performing a role in a larger conceptual and almost theatrical tableux, or what linguists call the fabula, still nonetheless has a significant aura of its own. One that demands private and uninterrupted observation and which subsequently reveals its own little microcosm of the narrative.
“Tiny Deaths” is a small but intense sculpture consisting of a file box containing unknown contents which illuminate a Buddha hand hovering above it. One gets the feeling that a collection of tiny deaths might occur moment by moment, which also means that perhaps there is a large death surrounding many tiny lives. But we don’t know why we feel this. An empathic exile has observed it however, and we feel the impact of her sharing.
“Splitting Up” is an installation piece which captures the existential essence of relationships, whether personal or political, or both. It seems important to note that the kind of antique saw used as one of its compositional components requires two people in order to function as a cutting implement.
Uncannily, the shadows cast by the red strings which form the bed (shadows are always as important in her work as the objects which cast them) are also spookily similar to the graphic arrangement she would later explore in her “Fencescape” works nearly a decade later, with its wall made of skin cells. This is continuum writ large.
And again, strangely, yet so very powerfully, “Tiny Deaths” also relates to a recent piece done also almost a decade later, “Soul Searching”, 2007, and it resonates in a most alarming way within the entire emblematic narrative.
“Soul Searching” is an installation of two items on what can best be described as a deacon’s bench: a bowl full of red stained latex gloves, next to book saturated by red pigment floating through pin-pricked pages. The book’s message has been transmogrified into a powdery substance which resembles bloody dust.
There is a gripping relationship between “Tiny Deaths”, 1998, and “Soul Searching”, 2007. The hand that hovers above the filing drawer containing a history of who knows what miniature mayhem, is also the hand that must pick and handle the book imbued with a red powdery and blood-like substance.
Except, of course, for those intrepid enough to eschew the use of the gloves and to handle the book directly, thus taking away little microscopic fragments of the sculpture when they leave the gallery. One can almost imagine those visitors going home and needing to wash off the crimson ink, however it is not quite so easy to cleanse oneself of our history.



The conceptual fables, a word derived from fabula, which abound in Perunovich’s work are as elusive as dreams and as subtle as sentient air. There is a reason for this, which also helps clarify their sometimes layered meanings.
Maps of meaning are walls constructed around the inexplicable fact of our being here, and her works tell us: look how they can be built and destroyed so easily. Like Nevelson’s insight into the nourishing aspects of the non-indigenous, Perunovich’s mixed media pieces celebrate a kind of anti-aboriginal stance, meaning that they focus on the virtues of being somewhat unsettled.
Our world is rife with references to the comforts of home and hearth: to settle in, to settle ourselves, to avoid being unsettled, since settlement itself is the gauge by which we measure our distances from the nomadic to the supposedly civilized state permanence.
But all of Perunovich’s works suggest that permanence is illusory, something we merely imagine for ourselves in order to carry on, and that the unique state of unsettlement is far more in keeping with our true condition. Needless to say, such artworks are by their very nature, somewhat unsettling.
That fragile membrane between the artist and her work, between the work and the public viewer and between the broader political and cultural discourses that result, are the key factors in what I see as this artist’s main cartographic function : art objects as a system for conducting metaphysical measurements.

That threshold, between the artist’s experience and the public’s recognition of their own, is where the sign becomes active and the emblem is invoked.
Certain artists and their work seem ideally suited to the rarified task of making such spiritual measurements, the kind that become emblematic of the enigma of both our existence and the identities that encapsulate it.
Some even manage to approach and communicate these ineffable sensations with a nearly shocking sense of clarity: boldly inviting the invisible to materialize before our eyes. Perunovich does this through a concerted emphasis on what the ancient Greeks referred to as anamnesis, the power of memory to memorialize itself through a kind of unconscious mourning.
Her work of the last twelve years or so has been quietly building a consistent language of images and objects designed to achieve her aesthetic agenda with maximum psychological impact. This overall continuity is of three major sorts: thematic continuity, in terms of the ideas explored; material continuity, in terms of the media and objects utilized, and psychic continuity, in terms of the personal feelings she is able to convey within a wider public and political context.





Since we all share some degree of complicity in today’s disintegrating world, we are able to actively enter into a dialogue with her work which results in unearthing the overall narrative, the story which her art tells us. Or rather, stories. The voice of her visual art, like the voice of an author, remains constant, while the stories that swirl through that voice shift focus and develop a meta-narrative, one based on what I believe is a compelling purpose. In her case, the stories and their purpose are one in the same.
As an artist, one of her roles is to provide a kind of evidence, for something which might pass unnoticed if not for a prolonged reverie state: evidence of the melting of time, the dislocation of space, the dissonance of mind, the mutability of self and other.
Perunovich’s aesthetic agenda, and the works that make it manifest, is strongly aligned with this kind of awareness, the realization that the once solid ground of history has become a softer, swamp-like environment. Her works are veritable diagrams of transition as the only permanent state. They frequently, if unconsciously, also mirror the building and tearing down of walls between people.
Often, her videos are also live documentations of the construction, deconstruction or performative aspects which otherwise silently reside in the static realm of her drawings, paintings and sculptures. They animate the emotions relating to building and destroying, using themselves as emblems for that special kind of entropy that accompanies every single move forward through transitional states.
Her pieces are the legible and visible patterns which reflect the wide range of feelings from fear and frivolity, to fury and fantasy, to exile and return, to enclosure and freedom, to living and dying. From the psychic dissonance arising from displacement, to the strange sad joy of reinstatement as a citizen of sentience, the works themselves are signposts on a pilgrimage enacted to both ritualize exile and to embody the entropy of exile.
Two such signposts are the related series of newer pieces called “Currency”, a video installation consisting of an apparent spill of blood spreading across a white void, projected behind one of her familiar elastic fences, and “History Repeating”, also from 2007, a sequence of panel paintings which capture the same spill in two dimensions.
Both appear to be daring time capsules which contain visual evidence, almost in a scientific format, of one of the principal messages behind much of her work, a feeling most accurately summed up in a line of poetry from Robert Duncan: Human blood is the ink of history.
I like to think of her art objects, whatever their medium, as metaphysical mneomics (another manifestation of anamnesis) as devices designed to help us memorize the repetitive feelings provoked by our déjà vu like existence. The patterns are ritualized in her artworks, since she manages to perform the role of empath so well, registering and calibrating the emotions associated with recurring parts of life and making contour maps of their topography. So that future travelers will remember our own brief journeys here.
And ironically, continuum itself, the link between two things or a series of things which blend into one another so gradually that we can’t detect when one becomes the other, is one of her principal subjects.
Oddly enough, those same child’s leg’s and shoes were also clearly featured in another incarnation as the focal point of her video made some seven years later, “Hanging By A Thread”, in which an unseen girl (actually the artist herself) plays on a playground swing surrounded by the unnerving sounds of screaming seagulls.
Perunovich asks us to consider the possibility of a future where emotions, and the enigmatic emblems which embody them, can be studied as if they were music. The reason? Because this is music. Frozen music. In a very real way, she engages in the orchestration of objects which contain the preserved energy of human emotions. Like the crystalline amber of certain ancient trees, these works memorialize those moments in which our emotions start to throw their weight around.
Two of the best examples of the empathic functioning in her work are found in “Blood and Belonging” and “Towers of Belief”, from 2004 and 2005 respectively, in which the barriers between human beings are reduced to the stark emblems of both simple walls and religious symbols. Such walls are always manifestations of human conflict, first internal and then externalized into the environment. Their deceptive simplicity conceals a gigantic sorrow.

In the end, the symbols are also walls of course, but of a different sort, walls of meaning imposing inclusion and exclusion onto spiritual experience. The obvious impact of using the cross, crescent and star images of the three most conflicted and yet most intimately connected religions is a way of creating a head-on collision with our most precious and dangerous delusions.
This must be what supreme disillusionment feels like, perhaps expressed so succinctly in a series like “Dark Tales”, when engaged in the sort of psychological weightlifting that I suggest Perunovich’s work represents. The presence of three key elements, the blood spill, the grey figure adjacent, and the chalkboard with erasures, suggests to me that the tales are dark because we never learn our lessons from history.
In her case especially, Perunovich manages to capture something fleeting that often artists overlook, or underlook: the sensation of what it feels like to engage in ritualistic looking. According to Merleau Ponty, our enigma is that our bodies simultaneously see and are seen, thus what we use for looking outward can also be used for looking inward, at ourselves.
In this regard, Perunovich has an exemplary grasp on what it means to try to grapple with inchoate and sometimes incomprehensible feelings and sensations associated with being alive. This is why I have coined the phrase which serves as the title for this survey exhibition: emblems of the enigma. She regularly produces emblems of the emotions provoked by our responses to the enigma of our existence.
But Perunovich, while contouring the emotional content slightly, definitely insists that the texture of emotions in her works remains as rough and abrasive as they need to be to call attention to what she wants us to feel and see.
Such a subtle study of both the dynamics and stasis of human interaction will undoubtedly be developed more concretely by science in the future. For us still living in the present, we have the presence of artworks such as both the “Wasted Youth” and Vicious Cycle” series from 2007, each one a harrowing sequence of advertisements for the abandonment of restraint in portraiture, seeking to portray people at a sub-humus level with a shattering intimacy that goes far beyond mere personality or character.
Her art objects do not necessarily denote meanings, they don’t, in other words, point at something and describe it. But they are connotations of meanings, suggesting that they can wear the conceptual clothing necessary to the job at hand. The job of expressing inexpressible feelings for things that are inexplicable.
Amongst these many diverse objects in mixed media and interdisciplinary contexts, I am delighted to report that there is also still a vestige of a very old and even ancient world in her overall sensibility. I think painting is still very important indeed, especially in our era, and I was delighted to discover that in addition to exploring her fabula in videos, installations, performances, drawings and conceptual, somewhat neo-surrealist sculpture, she has also produced a substantial body of painted work.
It too has a consistency enhanced by the fact that they are frequently sequential and serial, so it was a great pleasure to be able to situate her paintings within the overall scope of her output, and to show through selection, how the paintings further manifest a kind of emblematic cartography of feelings.
Of course, even though she still embraces the desire for painted images, she does so in her own distinctive manner, eschewing the use of traditional art materials in favour of her own palette of ingredients more often associated with the building trade.
Not surprisingly perhaps, given her interest in the drama of domesticity as it originates in the home and extends out into the world of society and politics, she produces her paintings with industrial housing materials, such as plaster and house paint, as opposed to the pretty tools of the trade in former times.
Each medium she uses is enlisted for a specific purpose, and the trajectory of this exhibition travels smoothly from its cardinal points of Home, Exile, Separation, Transition, Refuge and Sanctuary. The final suggestion being that home is in our heads, rather than necessarily in the soil of the homeland.
Beginning to think of the mind and spirit as a kind of psychic soil can help us come to grips with the pressures implicit in projecting and overly identifying with strictly physical geographies. It is, after all, the non-physical geographies of the imagination which are being mapped so incessantly by this gifted artist.


Here are documents in a dramatic tongue which give witness to things both horrid and hellish, while also being imbued with a poetic elegance and beauty that disorients us long enough to awaken from our nightmares, which in the end, might be the true purpose of all important art. History, another poet once remarked, is a dream from which we cannot awake.
Vessna Perunovich traces the stains from the ink of history in works that approach the threshold of awareness and situate us there gently, but with passion. After all, inexplicable doesn’t necessarily mean inexpressible.

Donald Brackett
Curator/Critic

The exhibition Emblems of the Enigma traveled across Canada to six public museums: Peterborough, Mississauga, Cambridge, Algoma, Halifax and Kelowna, and is accompanied by a handsomely illustrated catalogue.