Statement

This book is disgusting. I am disgusted by this book. Perfect-bound? Really? How much of the page are you going to lose in that canyon? Sweet Jesus I can't stand you. I made a book all about how wonderful handmade books are and then you put it in this hideous — no, I can't even call that monstrosity a book. I tell you all about how to design a book and then I even tell you how to make a hardcover (albeit casebound) book and what do you do? You give me a bloody mass-produced paperback. It is no more than I expected of you, though. I don't even care anymore. I just want to bind books for ever.

Statement

I wrote this short story initially with the song Goodbye, Alice in Wonderland by Jewel stuck in my head. The song talks about a girl’s desire to escape from Hollywood because she “craves reality.” In the song she says, “There is a difference between dreaming and pretending. I did not find paradise. It was only a reflection of my lonely mind wanting what’s been missing in my life." This inspired me to write a story about a girl living in a fantasy world, from which she longs to escape. I was later inspired to incorporate elements from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I chose to implement a Victorian framework for the book as well as illustrations of various artists' interpretations of Alice in Wonderland.

Statement

The Last Weekend is an attempt to remember and record the inside of my grandmother's -- Nana’s -- house. The book’s inspiration is charged by my fear of forgetting important events, and by my love for family members and for family spaces I have returned to repeatedly throughout my life. While my Nana is living in the moment, I am living in the past and dwelling on what I don't want to forget. My process involved trips to my Nana’s house, taking photos, going through old photo albums in the basement, and drawing images of what she can still remember. This work allowed me to explore the pain I feel about losing a psychic and emotional connection with my Nana.

Statement

Santa Isn't Real and You Are Going to Work 'Til You Die is an exploration of the book form as a time-based medium. It documents a brief performance and combines this with poetry written over the span of a year. Exploring multiple perspectives, brash conclusions, and confronting a new life as a young art student, the ideas sputter and fail and an overwhelming sense of pessimism broods over the writing.

Statement

Since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, more than one hundred thousand Korean women have immigrated to the United States after marrying American soldiers. In South Korea, these women were stigmatized by society, friends or even family and their marriages to foreign soldiers are considered sexually and morally “dirty.”  South Korea is more racially homogenous than America and women marrying American servicemen experience discrimination, not just against themselves but also against their children. Some of these women were prostitutes, some were not; but when it comes to the marriage, they are generally thought of in terms of having been a former prostitute.

My work focuses on photographing and interviewing Korean military brides who have experienced and are still experiencing immigration, interracial marriages, raising biracial kids, and discrimination in the United States. The photographs are not only of the Korean women themselves, but also of the insides of their homes, capturing places and objects that give a hint of military culture, and of both Korean and American cultures.

Because I am not from America, and have experienced living in this country as an outsider, I am interested in how foreigners settle down in this country, and in how they try to adjust their lives to this culture. In thinking about these Korean military brides, it is impossible not to think about how much more difficult their lives must have been, not knowing the language or having any economic safety here in the United States. As a Korean woman, I wanted to observe their lives and to understand their perspective on American culture. These photographs and interviews became a means for me to do so.

Statement

We've Got Your Summer at Rocky Point explores the memories and nostalgia still evoked by the 150 year old park that closed it doors 15 years ago. Many of the memories and photographs that appear in this book were collected through response to an add I had placed on craig's list. The response was an overwhelming amount of personal memories, family photos and old vhs tapes from generations of Rhode Islanders who still care about this landmark. This book is a collection of those memories, photographs, newspaper articles and other material effects relating to the park. The layout of this book was designed and paced keeping in mind the timeline of events that affected the park from its “glory days” in the 1970's through the mid-1980's to its final years of operation and eventual abandonment, decay and demolition.

Statement

50/200 is an artist's book about psychotherapy. It follows the conversation between a doctor and patient over the course of one 50 minute session. Quickly, however, the reader realizes that there is much more going on than simply what is being said.

Most of the time people don't say what they mean. Not really, anyway. And even when they do, the verbalization of their thoughts and feelings couldn't possibly express everything. Hidden behind every one sentence we speak is a slew of cognitive and emotional processes that gurgle around and combine to form what we say. The brain says, "No, don't say that, it's inappropriate," and "Say this, it went over well last time," and "Put a joke in here, then follow with a sincere statement, then gauge their reaction and see if they respond in a trustworthy way and then consider saying that other thing." Every new interaction is a new test and a new opportunity to say the wrong or right thing. A therapy session, however, is supposed to be the one time you can open up and say the whole truth uninhibited. Supposed to be.

Statement

You’re just like your father. This phrase, whether casually tossed about after an inappropriate joke or a serious mistake, was always spoken to me and not my sisters. I admit– we have a few similarities. We love chocolate, have been known to tell a fib or two, have raw senses of humor, and can doodle with the best of them.

My dad is a study in contradiction: he is very smart and creative but spends most of his day watching television, he is well read– with a particular interest in philosophy and poetry– but rarely talks about his ideas, and he has always been a caring and generous father but I’ve never heard him say “I love you.” He’s charming and friendly with jokes, jokes, jokes…but I’ve always sensed a little sadness and regret. At some point, he gave up on art and left it to me.

As my father nears retirement and I begin my career as an art teacher, I have begun to reflect on our similarities and differences. This is a story about how I came to shed my expectations of my father in order to appreciate the choices he’s made to stay with my family, care for his elderly mother, and let me determine my own path. I hope that this story expresses my reservations about becoming what others think is true and, most importantly, my love and respect for my father.

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I want to speak plainly and simply. By doing so, I’d like to put into language how I understand mourning. In this series of poems, what spurs the bargaining between ordinary and extraordinary happenings is mourning, in all its regalia. The collection unveils a sort of reconsideration of everyday life, and a regeneration in which cats walk together in packs to the ends of the city while a man sits in a car drinking his coffee. These interactions occur often as a laborious task while the language scrambles to remain unornamented. In another way, the mourning becomes a grey space that contains a quiet celebration of very small details, which little by little parenthesize the everyday.

Statement

This piece is an exploration of the genre of the children's story, but I have tried to extend the reach of its core concepts - "children" and "story" - throughout the text and illustrations in new and unique ways. In the simplest sense, this is a book for children and about children: it is designed to physically resemble a classic children’s book (the layout is in the style of 1950’s early reader books, like Dick and Jane, meant to tell simple easy stories) and its main characters are children.

In fact, because the story is semi-autobiographical, the protagonists are fictionalized versions of very specific children: my friends and me. In a sense, therefore, the piece is also meant to be understood as a book by a child. The action is viewed from my 9-year-old perspective, so it reflects the particular atmosphere, events, and experience of my own childhood.

This first-person perspective allowed me to explore the strikingly complex world children live in. Adults often forget or ignore the extent to which children are aware of the nuance in the world around them, and I wanted to emphasize that innate sensitivity in the piece.

However, the piece also illustrates one important way in which children simplify their relationship to concepts they do not understand. The illustrations, expressed mostly through allusions to different motifs, reflect the way many children think about "big issues:" ideas become associated with symbols, which makes them easier to relate to. For children, hearts represent "love," skulls represent "death," houses represent "family;" adults know these concepts cannot be captured by a single image, but children have no other way to process such abstract and amorphous ideas.

Statement

This mock child’s story is based on a series of elementary school experiences that a childhood friend and I endured. I present a scenario of what happens when a child does not stay within his socially accepted “role” in a school setting, a place where he is surrounded by other children. Sometimes, when a child does not act the way other children believe he or she should act, other children will ask questions because they do not understand and may also retaliate against the child.

I have developed a photo narrative with text to portray certain aspects of breaking codes of “gender normality” specifically in a children's setting. By taking a series of photos of Barbie doll sets, presented with text, I create a story centered on a young boy. As a child, I played with Barbie dolls for years, and used them to create elaborate environments and stories. My relationship with these dolls is bittersweet. They are a nostalgic childhood symbol of comfort, but they also represent the objectification of women and little girls. This story of a young boy is one of exclusion, prejudice and self-consciousness. However, it is also a story of survival and endurance.

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Arrhythmia is the journey through the body of a woman, her divorce and a healing. Found images bring levity to pain. Arrhythmia is offered as balm to others who have experienced the death of a dream.

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Apricots Before the Sky was inspired by my first visit to the Empire State Bulding in NYC.  On top of the building, a friend told me she has never eaten apricots before.  Coming from Turkey, where apricots are consumed year-round, I was inspired to write a personal story about fear of skyscrapers.  Illustrated by the photos I took, presented with a cover image of a close-up of an apricot's skin, Apricots Before the Sky explores the clash between the industrial and the organic. Across a hundred pages of various combinations of black and white imagery and orange printed typography, the book performs a rhythmic travel through various time periods and polar destinations that ultimately form the unified base of a personal psychological experiment.

The relationship between visual image and literary text are essential to my art making process. I challenge myself in terms of critical thinking, and integrate symbolism into my body of work which reads through images and sees through words. I refuse to work in any specific medium, as I consider the very core of my work to be an analytical appraisal of the various forms of creating artistic content and meaning. My medium is the aesthetic inquiry itself. With a growing interest in the semiotic combination of image and word, I seek to understand the interchangeable use of different media and degrees of communication in the fine arts.

Statement

Created is a story about an artist’s struggle to find a source of inspiration within the walls of an isolating world. Influenced by events in my own life, I composed the story of my struggle to create. Like many other people, including my character, I become emotionally involved with the people I encounter daily.

Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I watched parents disregard their children, perplexed by the lack of a loving bond between parent and child. I watched an intriguing young boy with the darkest rings around his eyes gaze up at me. I became lost in his eyes that told a story that had a million beginnings.

By retelling these two experiences within these pages, the book offers the reader a moment to see through my eyes. The story begins with the main character staring at himself in a mirror, as if at an image of the Great Oz. The main character puts pressure on himself to create, to invent something original to awe everyone. He struggles to find it within him, but what he doesn’t realize is everything exists around him. We need to learn to observe the world yet never forget to look within ourselves. Uniting his suffering to the people he meets helps him to break free from his own afflictions and rediscover his inspiration to create.

Statement

My room is full of things. Item upon item. Mirrors, chair, books, record player, records, colored pencils, necklaces, shoes, cameras; the list goes on. I have so many things, so many possessions—objects I want to hold onto. It’s not really the thing that I am clinging to, but rather the thought, the memory, the experience, the feeling associated with it. I am constantly seeking identity by turning to the objects that I surround myself with. I have come to realize that those I value most are the ones that are keepers of my strongest memories. I find meaning for my past and present self in these objects.

I became curious about what other people value. Do others have strange little keepers of memories that they would never give up in a million years? I began with a simple search of “prized possessions” on the internet and quickly realized that hundreds of people were sharing photographs of their favorite things. Belt buckles, kayaks, books, rings, toys, boots, sunglasses; I was itching to know the stories behind all of these objects of such personal value. I started e-mailing people to gather the reasons why they treasured these items, to find out what memory, feeling, or meaning they held. I found the responses intriguing—personal anecdotes from the first time they laid eyes on it, memories from simpler days, reminders of love and family.

Statement

I went to Montana imagining adventure. I left with romantic notions that I could reinvent myself from a Northeast city girl into a powerful Western woman, capable of feats of strength and survival in the vast, majestic backcountry.

Once there, I encountered a sense of otherness in relation to the land. Sometimes I was a visitor or explorer, at other times an alien or invasive species. The story of the mule remains central to my memory of that time. I have frequently told the story as proof of my wild Western adventures. Often, as I reflect on it now, it represents the strangeness and unease of being somewhere I didn’t belong. This book gives the memory tangible form, something you can hold in your hand, turn over, open and explore. Make of it what you will.

Statement

Light Hunting examines through the written word and illustration a sense of disconnect between family members that has developed throughout the years. I was born in the US shortly after my family arrived from Belarus.

Light Hunting includes the most personal work Volynsky has ever created. The free form writing style somehow quickly launches words onto paper while she attempts to gain a deeper understanding of her closest relationships and most complicated feelings. The process of writing was a major risk in her creative practice that allowed her creative practice to become a transformational method of moving forward in life.

Statement

I was never too sure of what to check off in the race column when I took American standardized tests growing up. The questions of what my ethnicity is and how it is perceived by a society that has a binary view of racial backgrounds was a constant source of frustration. This book encapsulates the moment during world travel where I had to make a choice about being happy with who I am and find a way to move forward.