Vessna Perunovich

Vessna Perunovich is a fearless creator. Her work—from figurative painting and photography to symbolic sculpture and provocative performance—defies categorization, brazenly asserting itself in an artistic climate that often wants to tether creative accomplishment to a single medium. Instead, this mid-career survey exhibition, curated by Donald Brackett, celebrates the work of an artist who is driven to seek out different forms based on the ideas she needs to express.

The resulting exhibition is a delicious, full-sensory experience. In one corner, a collection of paintings in varying sizes depicts crouched figures, sensuous shapes and meandering lines to great effect. In another, amorphous red blobs made of stretchy fabric spill from unlikely containers (ancient fire-truck horns, fencing masks) and straddle aged silver vessels like growths, while a video on a nearby wall depicts the artist brazenly carrying a bundle of pink, breast-like balloons through an Eastern city, defying an audible call to prayer.

But as disparate as the works in this exhibition appear to be, the unifying force—beyond the artist’s inclination to work in a palette of red, black and white, regardless of media—is a common one. Perunovich was born and raised in Belgrade, in a country once known as Yugoslavia and now called Serbia. She and her family immigrated to Canada in 1988 just as her own country was breaking apart. The work she has been making since is infused with both the tension and melancholy of displacement and the loss of home (in all senses of the word), as well as the struggle, and subtle joy, in establishing new roots, carving out a different identity and making it successfully through to the other side.

They are certainly the forces behind Splitting Up, a sculptural work that anchors this exhibition. The piece is created from a well-worn iron bed frame that’s been strung with lengths of blood-red stretchy fabric. There, balanced precariously on the taut fabric, is a long, old-fashioned double-handled cross-saw with large jagged teeth. The effect, not surprisingly, is violent and vaguely disturbing—the bed’s innate comfort and intimacy caught up in the saw’s latent potential—most notably, its potential for severing what in this case reads as symbolic blood ties.

Works like Continuum establish the searching for roots. In it, two sets of disparate boots—one pair child sized, the other on a more paternal scale—are joined by a single pair of legs. In Foundation, nearby, a tiny pair of girly shoes is wedged into the gap in a cement block—a simple manifestation of a childhood in a country that no longer exists, the struggle of the very weak versus the impossibly powerful.

The rooted/rootless idea continues in a series of photographs based on a performance called Transitory Places. In each the artist, tethered to the ground by a trio of thick, red elastic bands, leans forward into space at a precarious angle. She suspends herself weightlessly over everything from bodies of water to cobbled European streets, daring the earth to maintain its grip—and trusting that her self-declared roots will keep her from falling too far. In a related performance, I Hug the World and the World Hugs Me Back, Perunovich, still tethered, leans forward into the arms of passing strangers, forcing a momentary connection and boldly upsetting the rules of personal space and intimacy in a non-touching world.

Perunovich’s work is driven by the senses and steeped in ritual, and she challenges her audiences to partake. In Soul Searching, for example, a small notebook sits open on a stark, pew-like wooden bench, a handful of what look like blood-smeared surgical gloves in a bowl nearby. Donning the gloves, we are then invited to flip through the book, seeking out meaning on its pages, each one pricked through with thousands of tiny holes in a kind of reverse Brail.

Her ideas come together in the performed building of an ethereal red brick wall—the subject of a video work called Negotiating Utopia. In it, the artist constructs a convincing wall out of zig-zagging elastic bands. The resulting optical illusion enables the artist to walk, ghost-like, among the bricks. Unconstrained by barriers, she is free to go where she pleases. For Perunovich, it is a fitting metaphor. ❚

“Vessna Perunovich: Emblems of the Enigma,” curated by Donald Brackett, was exhibited at the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery from June 27 to August 2, 2009.

Meredith Dault is a freelance writer based in Halifax.