Baltimore-based Karen Yasinsky works in mixed-media drawing and animation.  Yasinsky favors raw imagery, stripped down to its essentials.  She achieves emotional depth through compressed, non-linear narratives whose meanings are residual and ambiguous.  Yasinsky’s still and animated drawings and her old-fashioned puppets—set in doll house-like environments—conjure a benign yet sinister domestic world.   The artist eschews the latest digital animation technologies, preferring to painstakingly render hand-drawn frames, shot on 16 millimeter film.  Yasinsky’s sound-tracks, incorporating dissociated sound and original scores, are the product of her collaboration with composers and sound artists.

            Karen Yasinsky’s current series, I Choose Darkness (2009), and her stop-motion puppet animation of the same title, takes as its inspiration the Robert Bresson film, Au hazard Balthazar (1966).   Balthazar is a compelling allegory of pain and abasement, set in provincial France.   Balthazar, a donkey, is adopted by a loving rural family, and following its first, blissful years, is passed from cruel master to cruel master.  Beaten, whipped, burned and mocked, at the end of the film Balthazar is shot and bleeds to death, abandoned in a field.   The family’s daughter Marie suffers her own cruelty, indignity and captivity, which parallel Balthazar’s.  Like the donkey, she is passed from male figure to male figure—from her father, to the wicked Gérard, to her childhood sweetheart, Jacques, a miscreant who mistreats and violates both Marie and Balthazar.  Marie disappears at the end of the film.  Au hazard Balthazar is understood variously for its ultimate pessimism, for its divine, biblical parallels, and as a transcendental message about human behavior.

            Yasinksy’s adaptation of Au hazard Balthazar, a signal film in director Robert Bresson’s career, would seem to rest not only on its narrative storyline, but on its style.  Yasinsky shares filmic affinities with Bresson.  Balthazar is elliptical in its story-telling and editing; Bresson is known for the dense effect—the fullness—of his austere film-making.  Bresson noted of Balthazar that it is “the world in an hour and a half.”   Yasinsky’s attention to oblique incidents, characters, mystery and enigma, sound, unusual cropping and narrative interruption, is reminiscent of Bresson and French New Wave cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.  Her work is rich in implication for its simplicity.

Yasinsky’s animations resist easy interpretation or resolution.  A restless atmosphere of emotional upheaval, anxiety and discomfort pervades the work.  Bodies twitch nervously, and protagonists tentatively touch themselves and one another, revealing utterly personal vulnerabilities.  The artist Laurie Simmons has written: “An uneasy wind blows through Yasinsky’s animated films.”    Yasinsky’s characters reveal indecision and awkwardness in their private moments alone.   Her shimmering animations alternate between stillness and constant motion.  Subjects locked in a limited, repetitive scope of motion, amplify the power of touch and gesture.  Without spoken dialogue, Yasinsky’s actors signal complex aspects of the human condition such as attraction, repulsion, joy, repression and indifference.

            The travails of the conflicted young woman—girlfriend or newlywed—making her way innocently in the world, is recurrent thread in this exhibition, and in Yasinsky’s larger project.   Marie (or Mary) and Juliette, who appear in the animations and drawings in this exhibition, are characters of the same name, featured respectively in the films Au hazard Balthazar and L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934).  Yasinsky’s female protagonists, caught in a gendered web of domestic expectation are, at times, the recipients of emotional and physical rejection and other abuses from their male suitors.  These young women exhibit an unresolved tension between strength of determination and weakness.  Seeming devoid of agency, Marie in the drawing animation of the same name, is reduced to mumbling in an incoherent voice, unable to penetrate beyond her own world.  Though passive, self-conscious and unsure, the artist’s subjects are, by turns, also strong.  Yasinsky’s heroines exercise power and even aggression, appearing larger-than-life, unexpectedly launching at and striking male figures—projectile-like.  On the other hand, women are swept off their feet in matrimonial bliss, or they are imaged as physically recumbent, exposed and vulnerable.  From time-to-time, in Yasinsky’s work (and in film narratives on which her work is based), women diminish, dissolve, or disappear altogether.  Fulfilling traditional gender stereotypes, Yasinsky’s protagonists harbor romantic fantasies and can be heard sobbing emotionally—experiencing rejection, unrequited love and unconsummated passion. 

Yasinsky’s Enough to Drive You Mad (2009) is a farcical, madcap animation featuring Marie, Balthazar and Mr. Magoo, the blind, diminutive old misanthrope—a 1950s cartoon character.  Marie’s startling metamorphoses in this animation—though played off amusingly in reaction to Mr. Magoo’s annoying provocations—complicate and add dimension to her character in the context of the series.  In the animation, Marie is momentarily faceless.  And, her facial features become distorted and animal-like—both humorous and grotesque—before transforming back.  How do we read her attitude?  Is she simply making childish faces, or are her facial changes a sign of madness?  Marie’s transformations—at once funny and strange—are perhaps the psychological result of her character’s unresolved struggle.  Yasinsky’s I Choose Darkness, is an unsettling and profound reflection on women’s interiorized experience in negotiating power, choice and relationships.  

 Dan Younger

Director

 This exhibition and its educational programming and printed materials are supported, in part, by the Mesaros Fund for Art.  Thanks are extended to the artist and to Mireille Mosler of Mireille Mosler, Ltd., New York.