Yelena Zhelezov has organized the Lacen Project’s inaugural exhibtion, “Thrice the Bed,” featuring her own work, alongside work by Erich Böllmann and Andy Robert. She’s organized the exhibition to examine the exchange between written language and visual performance. By positioning the work within a stage of narrative gestures, she translates words to objects, inviting the audience to decipher/conjure up a tragic play.
Opening night is March 7th, and runs through March 28th. Details here!
EAST COAST, WEST COAST A performance by Six Points Fellow Yelena Zhelezov, with Amy Howden-Chapman and Eugene Kotlyarenko at Actual Size Los Angeles, December 7, 2012 8-10pm.
In this one-night performance in conjunction with the closing weekend of Sculptures from the Pedestrian Memory Bureau, Yelena Zhelezov will use sculptural objects and projection to interpret “East Coast, West Coast,” a video that documents a 1969 conversation between artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Amy Howden-Chapman will read the part of Robert Smithson and Eugene Kotlyarenko will read for Nancy Holt. The dialogue parses out bi-coastal approaches to art making and explores the dynamic between structure and intuition in the act of examining one’s environment. The exhibition will be open for viewing at 8:00pm and the performance will begin promptly at 9:00pm.
The exhibition, Sculptures from the Pedestrian Memory Bureau, features a collection of Yelena Zhelezov’s recent sculptures and performative objects. The works displayed act as playful ciphers, translating topographic markers into lyric constructions that intimately investigate the biological and social body in space and time.
Yelena Zhelezov’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, installation, film, drawing, and sculpture. Though her approach stems from research and critical engagement, she intuitively constructs and stages her work. Zhelezov often builds structures and modular parts that can be transformed by the individuals that interact with them. This process endows each object with its own layered history and expressive potential.
“The Worlds Most Charming Instrument” is a participatory installation piece that generates a looping soundscape of soft harp tones. This children’s zither was produced in Belarus, the area Yelena Zhelezov was born. One can play specific songs on the instrument by following a visual score that is slid beneath the strings. The song sheets indicate which string needs to be plucked and the order in which each note should be played. The scores of this instrument are black and white photographs of the Los Angeles landscape. In order to perform the songs the viewer must read the fronds of palm trees as musical notation. A projection visually amplifies this tactile exploration and the cycle of recorded sound creates a wistful and eerie baseline for Zhelezov’s constructed environment.
Shelves staggered along the gallery wall elevate diminutive porcelain sculptures of buildings, palm trees, cars, and abstract structures, dramatizing these handmade ceramics with a tongue in cheek gravitas. The figures were originally employed as interpretive tools for a body of work entitled, “PEDXING.” For this ongoing project, Zhelezov produces participatory installations that explore traditional Jewish leitmotifs of oral history and migration. Yelena Zhelezov investigates personal and societal relationships to space by staging mobile memory collecting stations in public areas. She uses the sculptures as interpretive markers to record stories from the individuals that she encounters. Removed from their performative context, the porcelain works become independent entities. The figures form a structural typology of Los Angeles. They exist as moveable monuments in absurd, poetic landscapes that could serve as utopian models or memorials for a remembered place.
Actual Size Los Angeles
741 New High Street
Los Angeles CA
90012
Six Points Fellow Yelena Zhelezov will be performing at KChung Radio as part of the show Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers on Saturday October 27th!
Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers
@ KChung Radio
408 Cottage Home St Los Angeles, CA 90012
27 October at 20:00 – 28 October at 3:00
Sculptures from the Pedestrian Memory Bureau: New Work by Yelena Zhelezov
November 3 – December 8, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 3rd, 7-10pm
The exhibition features a collection of Zhelezov’s recent sculptures and performative objects. The works displayed act as playful ciphers, translating topographic markers into lyric constructions that intimately investigate the biological and social body in space and time.
Yelena Zhelezov’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, installation, film, drawing, and sculpture. Though her approach stems from research and critical engagement, she intuitively constructs and stages her work. Zhelezov often builds structures and modular parts that can be transformed by the individuals that interact with them. This process endows each object with its own layered history and expressive potential.
The Worlds Most Charming Instrument is a participatory installation piece that generates a looping soundscape of soft harp tones. This children’s zither was produced in Belarus, the area Yelena Zhelezov was born. One can play specific songs on the instrument by following a visual score that is slid beneath the strings. The song sheets indicate which string needs to be plucked and the order in which each note should be played. The scores of this instrument are black and white photographs of the Los Angeles landscape. In order to perform the songs the viewer must read the fronds of palm trees as musical notation. A projection visually amplifies this tactile exploration and the cycle of recorded sound creates a wistful and eerie baseline for Zhelezov’s constructed environment.
Pedestals in the gallery elevate diminutive porcelain sculptures of buildings, palm trees, cars, and abstract structures, dramatizing these handmade ceramics with a tongue in cheek gravitas. The figures were originally employed as interpretive tools for a body of work entitled, PEDXING. For this ongoing project, Zhelezov produces participatory installations that explore traditional Jewish leitmotifs of oral history and migration. Yelena Zhelezov investigates personal and societal relationships to space by staging mobile memory collecting stations in public areas. She uses the sculptures as interpretive markers to record stories from the individuals that she encounters. Removed from their performative context, the porcelain works become independent entities. The figures form a structural typology of Los Angeles. They exist as moveable monuments in absurd, poetic landscapes that could serve as utopian models or memorials for a remembered place.
Sometime in November:
Zhelezov and special guests will use puppetry to interpret East Coast, West Coast, a video that documents a conversation between Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in which they parse the bi-coastal approaches to art making in 1969.
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Actual Size Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12:00- 5:00pm; Sunday-Friday by appointment.
Follow Actual Size Los Angeles on and for event details.
Actual Size Los Angeles
741 New High St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 290-5458
Fellow Yelena Zhelezov’s Pedestrian Memory Bureau will be popping up all over the West Side over the next month! The Pedestrian Memory Bureau is one aspect of Yelena’s Six Points project. To support, stop by and enjoy her interactive performance on the following dates:
Information about upcoming performances coming soon.
Catch Perform Chinatown, this Saturday. The inaugural public performance of Yelena Zhelezov’s Pop Up Pedestrian Memory Bureau will take place from 6 to 9 pm. The Pedestrian Memory Bureau is a part of Yelena’s Six Points Project and this will be the first of many compelling and interesting events and performances to come.
A social service that caters to the ephemeral need to relive the past, the one-person institution travels through Los Angeles in the manner of a Euro-Jewish peddler, providing shade, water, carrots, sewing supplies, and book information in exchange for the re-enactment of social-spatial memories through the use of miniature ceramic architecture. Informed by the experiences of the Post-Soviet Jewish population of LA, the Bureau examines how the landscape has absorbed immigrants’ ideas of space from their homeland. In this way, the Bureau attempts to create small discursive bridges between two disparate geographic locations.
Yelena’s interest in the spatial and temporal disconnect from the site of familial history and ideology comes from her relocation to the United States. This first appearance will take place in Chung King Plaza in Chinatown as part of Perform Chinatown LA.
Fellow Yelena Zhelezov is part the group show The History of the Universe Part One: In The Beginning at Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum
in Cincinnati, OH! Saturday, July 7, 2012 from 7-11 PM.
Join Yelena Zhelezov at the pop-up !
Collecting memories in exchange for performance. Part of PEDXING
a research and performance project on traversing LA by foot
and post-Soviet Jewish experience.
July 6/ 10 am- 4 pm
Plummer Park, West Hollywood
On June 26th at 7pm Yelena Zhelezov will be discussing the translation of industrial production on the KCHUNG radio show. She will also be featured on the show on the last Tuesday of every month!