Fresh off her Smithsonian artist research fellowship, Yulia Pinkusevich is working on a project to encourage viewers to consider the impact of each photo.
OAKLAND, Calif. — When Northeastern University associate professor Yulia Pinkusevich was 8 years old, her family fled Kharkiv, Ukraine, and immigrated to New York City. The Soviet Union was collapsing.
On the way to the airport, young Yulia saw that the asphalt near the airport was crisscrossed with grooves. They were the tracks of tanks.
“I’ve always been interested in moments of tension and how we visualize them,” Pinkusevich says. “Those marks are abstract, but they are the traces of political unrest and upheaval.”
As faculty in the College of Arts, Media and Design, Pinkusevich teaches painting, drawing and composition on the Oakland campus, working with students in a large, airy classroom next to her office in the Aron Art Center. As an artist she has created drawings, paintings and large-scale installations that explore the environment and social systems.
As a researcher, she has a special interest in the military, war and the Cold War in particular. That’s what she dug into as a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow last summer. She spent a month at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., sifting through the declassified archives of Dino Brugioni, an intelligence analyst who fought in World War II and later developed the use of aerial surveillance as an intelligence tool.
“He developed the field of air reconnaissance, analyzing spy photography to gain information for the government,” says Pinkusevich, seated in her large painting studio in downtown Oakland. “There were 27 cubic feet of personal papers. I got through maybe half of it.”
What she found, in imagery archives from the 1920s through the 1980s, is a treasure trove of photos documenting destruction. Bombs dropping from planes, pockmarked landscapes and aerial bomb bursts that look like explosions of white flowers — all shot by photographers in war planes. The locations are unrecognizable, but Pinkusevich knows from archival documents that they are photos of the European theater, mostly Germany and the beaches of Normandy.
Some of these images hang on her studio wall — massive black and white photos textured with the grainy marks of time. Placed among the images are smaller paintings Pinkusevich made herself that echo some of the floral bursts and pockmarks.
She calls the paintings “Flowers of Love for Children of Bombs.”
“How many innocent beings are caught in wars? Children, countless animals, poisoned aqueducts and rivers,” she says. “War swallows everything in its path.”
Based on the photography research, Pinkusevich is developing a project tentatively organized in three parts: images of World War I, World War II and contemporary wars. Her own work will be juxtaposed with the photos in an effort to add “empathetic gestures” to images of violence.
“I often deal with heavy subjects,” she says.
“This project has so much to do with the onslaught of images of violence we are all subject to on social media. We are inundated in a scroll format,” she says, swiping the air with one finger, “which dilutes the power and severity of the images.”
Using historic photos to explore war, she says, may invite viewers to slow down and consider the time, place and impact of each image more deeply, connecting it to contemporary experiences of war.
Her research into military imagery dates to an earlier project at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, a former military facility that included a Nike missile site during the Cold War. Pinkusevich found a declassified military manual for soldiers that included instructions on how to create diagrams to assess the casualty count in a hypothetical nuclear attack upon various habitable regions. The image shows concentric circles emanating from a target site of a bombed location.
“It was beautiful but disturbing,” she says. “One hundred thousand casualties represented in calm, orderly geometry.”
With the work she is developing from her research at the Smithsonian, Pinkusevich wants to connect the visual language of destruction with paintings that depict life.
“It’s a complex task,” she says. “There’s never been more reason to think about this and work towards ending war.”