Arts'tination’s Featured Window Exhibiting Artist - An Interview With Dr. Yemonja Smalls
In this exclusive interview, Dr. Yemonja Smalls, our Arts’tination featured window exhibiting artist, delves into the themes behind her captivating artwork, her unique creative journey, and the inspiration behind her current body of work on display in our gallery windows. Discover how she balances her full-time career with her passion for art and where you can find more of her captivating creations. Visit Arts’tination today to see her beautiful body of work, FACING YOU, in our gallery windows.
Facing You
ARTIST STATEMENT
My creative practice focuses on a meticulous exploration of relationships. Through the selection and deconstruction of materials, I strategically and yet sometimes haphazardly build and reassign connections, assembling media to convey the complexities that color unions. I seek to explore both metaphorical and literal processes of breaking, tearing, hiding, layering, and cementing to yield insight into what creates and maintains linkages.
Facing You presents multifaceted layers of the visage with precision. In each faces' development, its the knowing what's behind -the mistakes, secrets, fears, unspoken loves, hope, dreams, desires- that reflect facades that we present outwardly to others. Beneath the wooden, canvas and fabric layers, there are stories. Under rouged cheeks, and shiny eyes, and structured brows are chips and fractured pieces and written words that support what the viewer welcomes as beautiful. I invite you to see yourself somewhere within each, man or woman or in between. Although each carry the features of African roots, the face reflects variegated human.
In creating, I observe the impact that time has on the security of the bond. In formation, there are many shifts and observed instabilities. While what emerges is visually noisy, and rarely balanced, there's an appreciation for collaboration where, even in fractured situations, there's wholeness. Each is held closely by a golden cord of paint, otherworldly and secure.
About Dr. Yemonja Smalls
Dr. Yemonja Smalls is multidisciplinary artist with very little formal artistic training. Originally from Hershey, PA, but a recent Chicago, IL to Baltimore, MD transplant, she works in the Maryland Department of Health's Developmental Disabilities Administration.
Yemonja's mixed media creations in various mediums have been exhibited in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the Frederick Douglass Issac-Meyers Maritime Museum, Hill Center Galleries, on the set of the famous Fox Hit TV show "Empire", Harold Washington Library, South Side Community Art Center, Howard University, the Sojourner Family Peace Center among others, and reside in various private collections across the nation.
Web: www.yemonjapaints.com
IG: www.instagram.com/yemonjapaints
FB: www.facebook.com/YemonjaSmalls