History's Imprint on Landscape & Ourselves

Please join artist Jenny Yurshansky for an in-person foraging walking landscape tour and discussion, eco-hammer printmaking, and writing workshop. This workshop will offer us the opportunity to think about invasive plants and the stories they tell us about our landscape and history.

How are the plants that we find growing around us indicators of larger socio-historical patterns that we can identify or contextualize ourselves within? How can this be understood in the framework of immigration and displacement? Where do we fit in that story? Artist, Jenny Yurshansky, will share information with you about her practice and how she deals with these questions in her work. She will guide participants through identifying, collecting, and creating an eco hammer print using plants participants will collect on a foraging walk. Participants will then have the opportunity to write a poem, a story, or create a drawing that describes the connections they have with the plants they have collected. These two elements will be digitally combined and will be integrated into a large story quilt that Yurshansky is creating with communities throughout California. These will be exhibited in Summer 2023 at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. This collaborative creation is designed to reflect upon the myriad forms in which histories, traumas, social movements, and how small decisions have untold consequences that are experienced at the individual level.

Jenny Yurshansky was born stateless in Rome by way of Soviet-era Moldova. Her practice is deeply informed by being a refugee, using a research-based approach to explore the trauma of displacement and interrogate notions of belonging and otherness within the frames of landscape, historical documents, and social constructs; formally, this manifests as absence, loss, or erasure. Her long-term projects form intertwined narratives and span the mediums of sculpture, photography, installation, and writing.

Part of the Refocusing Ecology Workshop Series, sponsored by the City Arts Recovery Design (CARD) Program of City of Santa Cruz.