Firstindigo&Lifestyle

21-century art

Tag: Olena Jennings

  • Olena Jennings: THE MEMORY PROJECT

    Olena Jennings: THE MEMORY PROJECT

    In 2018, a New York City poet Olena Jennings created poetry based on her family’s stories, attempting to visualise photography with words. The poems that resemble photography, carry them as frameworks of memory. In Olena Jenning’s THE MEMORY PROJECT: The memory comes before the poem. The poem comes before the art.

    “I chose ink and paper for the poems. I chose fabric for the art. The poems are a small slice of time in which I experienced memories, many based on photographs in my grandparents’ photo album. I experienced the memories in 2018 and they were embellished by memories I was creating as I lived.” 

    The project was presented in various incarnations at Queens Farm, the Red Barn, and Bliss on Bliss Studio.

    POPPIES        Olena Jennings 

    Red and blue on the dresser,
    dust in the folds,
    stretching towards the dim lamp.
    Click of lipstick cap,
    spritz of perfume,
    snap of purse,
    and she will turn the light off.
    The flowers will wither
    into their dreams
    and I will put my lips
    into their centers,
    ready to blow away pollen.
    The yellow dust caught in my eyes,
    when I see for a moment
    from her perspective, I look out
    onto the yard. I see myself
    throwing a rubber ball into the flowers,
    crushing their petals,
    the place where I convinced
    my little brother there was a snake,
    there was something to fear.
    To make up for my deception,
    I gave him one of the plastic flowers,
    deceiving him again, pretending
    I bought it at the corner gas station
    from which we had collected all
    of our dishes with the points we got
    from pumping gas. I want to make up
    more than that now—absences
    when I would become like that yellow dust,
    a quiet star.

    Olena Jennings, Map Dress, installation view. Photo: Elvis Krajnak.

    PAPER MAPS        Olena Jennings

    Even flat maps have texture.
    They carry with them
    someone’s memory of the streets.
    I will walk near the water
    to draw the places off the map
    on the palm of my hand.

    We used to make paper
    out of recycled letters,
    rough, imperfect,
    for a moment – wet,
    on our knees
    ripping

    We mark our way to the castle
    with the handle of a shovel.
    We could live inside
    our fairytale, find our way
    despite the sand
    in our eyes.

    Poems and dresses by Olena Jennings. Photos of the dresses by Elvis Krajnak.

    https://www.olenajennings.com/

  • Olena Jennings: Correspondence

    Olena Jennings: Correspondence

    Olena Jennings’s recent poetry narrates travel to Georgia in the summer of 2017. Her lyric lingers between urbanness and coupling, remembering moments, and capturing an essence of absurdity.

    September 2, 2017, NYC

    Stray cats begged at our table, as our faces
grew moist, looking up at the sun.
Enclosures followed: the tight
space on the plane and then the cubicle. 
I ignored the eclipse, the way the shadows
on the pavement repeated themselves
like the words that fall in steady drops, 
overpowering the notations on calendars
and to-do lists. We wake beneath
the blanket from the market 
near the dry bridge. Once we drove 
towards the light, the tires against
cobblestones, the shape of the moon
calling us to the rows of jewelry, 
the repetition of desire for translucent beads
around your neck.

    September 13, 2017, NYC

    You gave me the key. There is a trick
you didn’t teach me, though there were often lessons:
the way to peel a carrot, to cut an onion without 
crying, and to buy carnations instead of roses. 
You spun daily life like the plot
of one of your romance novels. Your dress is always
caught in the wind even when there is only the breeze
from the window. You invite the men over who leave
their newspapers on the table, so that you are subject
to the nightly violence. Sometimes
there is even a hand against your cheek emphasizing
the glow. The street signs shine green, creating a map
of our memories. Together we lived in this house 
until you started filling the walls with other peoples’ 
portraits.
    Olena Jennings, Georgia Kitten.
    Olena Jennings, Georgia Kitten, 2017.

    GHOSTS OF CATS

    They prance down
 the hall to the studio
 where scent
 is outlawed.
 Making it even easier
 to forget
 the view of the lake
 from my window.
 I’m always working
 on the same translation,
 anarchy in my head
 and cancelled European
 adventures, my body
 already halfway there.
 He is shocked by
 the connection with his
 words, as if they are mine:
 the moment he looked up
 at the hall light
 on his way to borrow stamps
 and saw the world. I wake up
 early to caress his heart,
 but I know in this studio
 when we finally meet
 everything is too real to exist
 the way we dreamed it. There
 is the blue door, the water boiling for
 the French press, and my bare feet
 against the soft rug.

    Olena Jennings’s collection of poetry “Songs from an Apartment” was released in 2017 by Underground Books. Her translations of poetry from Ukrainian can be found in Chelsea, Poetry International, and Wolf. She has published fiction in Joyland, Pioneertown, and Projecttile. Her novel Shut Mouth will be published in 2018. She completed her MFA in writing at Columbia and her MA focusing in Ukrainian literature at the University of Alberta.

    Artist website: olenajennings.com