The Distance Between Monuments IV
Artist
Lynne Avadenka
(American, born 1955)
Date2006
MediumPencil, graphite, gouache, collage on paper
DimensionsPaper Size: 23 × 16 1/2 in. (58.4 × 41.9 cm)
Frame Size: 25 1/2 × 18 1/2 in. (64.8 × 47 cm)
ClassificationsCollage
Credit LineBequest of James Pearson Duffy, 2015
Object numberUAC6328
DescriptionIn 2006, printmaker Lynne Avadenka traveled from Detroit to a small town in Bavaria for a month-long artist residency. “I had never been to Germany before,” she reports in an email, “and as a Jewish person was a bit apprehensive.” During her visit, Avadenka says she encountered “monuments everywhere.” Some were war memorials, others were dedicated to victims of the Holocaust; often they were not far apart from one another. The “distance” in the title of her collage refers to this physical proximity, but also to temporal distance; Avadenka wonders “how far we’ve come, with regard to attitudes and policies.” As if mapping the mental wanderings of a visitor lost in thought while walking unfamiliar streets, Avadenka’s collage traces a path connecting the personal and the historical. Two versions of the physical landscape are represented: sections of maps, distant and clinical; and hand-drawn blades of grass, closely observed, as if the artist were lying on her belly in a field. In the background, there are four earth-toned pools that evoke bodily fluids, or perhaps the “four humors” — black bile, phlegm, yellow bile, and blood — once thought by ancient physicians to influence one’s personality, and which correspond to the “four elements” of earth, water, fire, and air, respectively. The edges of the pools meet up with the roads, rivers, and fortress walls on the maps. Wiry lines and hazy shadows drawn in graphite jump the gaps between images, making more connections. Avadenka, who often incorporates typography into her work, here includes a snippet of text in Hebrew, the first lines of Psalm 133: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” — a plea for peace from the shadows of the memorials to genocide and war.
Text by Sean Bieri
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Even before receiving her MFA from Wayne State in 1981, Lynne Avadenka was making prints and artist books on the lightweight industrial press she purchased in 1979. She has exhibited widely since, including solo shows at the Willis Gallery (1983), the Detroit Institute of Arts (1999), and galleries in New York, Jerusalem, and Berlin. In 2013, Avadenka became director of the non-profit Signal-Return, a letterpress studio in Eastern Market that hosts printmaking workshops as well as poetry readings and other arts events. Avadenka received the Career Achievement Award from the Wayne State Department of Art and Art History in 2016.
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