Whether through Ovid’s Daedalus and Icarus, Da Vinci ’s flying machines, or Rebecca Horn’s winged body extensions, flight has continuously inspired human existence. In Grüne-Yanoff’s Cassandra, the thought of flight envisioned through imagination is a catalyst that encourages a sense of self and what it means to be human. Cassandra reflects humanity; she is identifiable through her longing.
A soundscape of layers including birdsong, the flapping of wings during taking off, and a subtle heartbeat welcome visitors into the exhibition GRAVITY by Swedish-American artist Joanne Grüne-Yanoff. The sounds are evocative and lay the groundwork for the exhibition which unfolds into three scenes spread throughout the gallery’s rooms and encourage exploration, imagination, and interaction. Along the way, the presence of someone can be felt and traces of their existence begin to emerge from one room to the next. It is Cassandra; she guides us on a journey of contemplation and shows us how to reach for the sky.
Grüne-Yanoff is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, sound, sculpture, and textile. Her role expands further to include director and playwright, inventor and maker, storyteller and community builder. Through her practice, she works with various materials that perform and support her fascination with the innate realm of being. Cassandra is a part of this, a character who investigates contemplation and longing. Metaphorically, Cassandra embodies Grüne-Yanoff’s practice, that of a grounded being who looks up to the sky, thinking about flight.
Whether through Ovid’s Daedalus and Icarus, Da Vinci ’s flying machines, or Rebecca Horn’s winged body extensions, flight has continuously inspired human existence. In Grüne-Yanoff’s Cassandra, the thought of flight envisioned through imagination is a catalyst that encourages a sense of self and what it means to be human. Cassandra reflects humanity; she is identifiable through her longing. The emotive desire behind Cassandra trying to fly fuels what Grüne-Yanoff calls, “the absurd gestures of Cassandra” and evidence of her attempts are revealed in different ways in the exhibition.
Within the three rooms of the gallery, audiences are introduced to a range of artworks by Grüne-Yanoff including drawings, sculptures, lenticulars and a film. Upon entering the first room of GRAVITY, visitors are presented with an array of objects. Their importance connect to the other works in the exhibition and simultaneously offer glimpses into the artist’s working methods. Props for Cassandra, artist sketches and notes, curious assemblages, and the soundscape foreshadow the exhibition’s narrative. Here is evidence of process, time, and the artist’s hand.
Grüne-Yanoff expresses concepts through a unique material vocabulary, and she consistently employs textiles, thread, wings, copper wire, wax, salt, text, twigs, old photographs, moss, and eggshells. For Grüne-Yanoff, these materials contain metaphorical and symbolic meanings which, through repeated use, guide her exploration of interior worlds. Her extensive encyclopedia of materials has been collected over many years and brought to her studio to be stored in vials, cloistered in boxes, or incorporated into future artworks. These collections can be seen as clues about existence, time, and fragility and they also reference a time when women cultivated a hidden knowledge within their domestic constraints, gathering plants to create medicines and secreting messages into embroidery. Grüne-Yanoff adds to these traditions with a nod to such constraints. She sews, stains, cuts, tears, embroiders and rejoins fabrics as a means to explore emotional and psychological states of connection and separation. She exposes and keeps the flawed details in the fabrics, allowing them to form part of the continuing whole.
Within Grüne-Yanoff’s works, one thing connects to another. Textile processes appear in different ways — a torn polaroid photograph is mended together with thread, and embroidered text becomes a pattern that adorns a cape for Cassandra which is then captured in the unique lenticular prints in the main room of the gallery. Another accessory worn by Cassandra is a crown made of eggshells which Grüne-Yanoff collected and painstakingly assembled. The crown’s fragile and tenacious appearance makes the work singular, like a relic meant for only a select few. Despite its fragility, the symbolism of the eggshell as a capsule of fertility, nourishment and protection is also a testimony to existence and future evolution. An extravagant necklace is also on display, constructed with a band of small glass vials buffered by a ring of white feathers. These props suggest a means of entry, an access point, a way to transport into imagined possibilities. They also appear in the film in the third room of the exhibition that explores Cassandra’s fascination with flight through another medium.
Ultimately, Grüne-Yanoff fuses a variety of different traditions of storytelling to build a world that is as surreal as it is universal.
A sense of surrealism is evident in the larger room of the gallery where several lenticulars in various sizes are displayed on the walls. In the same way artists make daily sketches, Grüne-Yanoff regularly makes short videos to capture moments or places in nature that fascinate her. The lenticulars are a continuation of this process and simultaneously provide movement and a filmic quality. In this series of works, Cassandra emerges as a plurality of beings with many guises. The props from the first room, such as the drawings and crown of eggshells, are now identifiable as part of Cassandra’s script and wardrobe. The lenticulars document scenes of Cassandra during various flight escapades and moments of contemplation. We see her inside the architectural frame of a window looking outside, sitting in trees or standing alone on the horizon where land meets sea. In these moments, Cassandra is reaching out and reaching in. She is always searching between the sky and the ground; she looks up to the sky with longing, and she looks downward testing and confirming her connection to the Earth.
The lenticulars all share a nostalgic aesthetic emphasized through a palette of colors that evoke a calm, energized beauty in the works not unlike the unique light that settles across Swedish landscapes. The images could be memories of a place we have seen, visited, or dreamed of. Within each lenticular, Cassandra is captured in various moments: she is jumping, flapping her arms, preparing for take-off, resting, balancing on tightropes, and revealing secrets. The viewer is an integral part of this performance – as one moves in front of a lenticular, Cassandra’s gestures are activated and she is released from a static state. Her gestures are instructions, encouraging one to access a different way of behaving. For the artist, the acts of flapping arms and jumping contain a certain absurdity, and therein lies their power. It is through the physical and emotional exertion of pretending when imagination becomes real. While the surrealists of the past painted, wrote or photographed dreamscapes of the mind, Grüne-Yanoff presents a physical and bodily experience that fosters the pathway to these other realities.
The conclusion of the exhibition is presented as a film, The Cassandra’s Cycle: Memory. Here we can watch Cassandra in the real world as she moves around her home, wearing a flight suit and the crown of eggshells. From the beginning to the end of the film, Cassandra performs a choreography that fluctuates between birdlike movements of flapping her arms and trying to take off. We get to know more about Cassandra as she converses with an unseen, yet youthful sounding person who persistently asks questions to understand and challenge Cassandra’s actions. Soon Cassandra admits that she doesn’t actually want to fly, rather she likes to think about it— to imagine flying.
In GRAVITY, all the works relate to the idea that Cassandra chooses to inhabit a constant space of longing. For Cassandra, jumping into the air is as important as landing back on the ground and in these moments, her desires are satisfied. Cassandra activates imagination and allows it to expand, and with each breathless jump she makes, she takes us with her.
— written by Anne Klontz
Interview with Joanne Grüne-Yanoff in C-print HERE.
