Maya Hayuk, Visiting Artist

I just checked out Maya Hayuk's work, after seeing that she is coming to visit next week. Check out these videos, and read some words below, from a story by her friend. I am drawn to her work for it's visual references to quiltmaking, and for it's pseudo-folk art qualities of obsessive, almost amateurist mark-making.





Maya is also an avid photographer, recording natural phenomena as well as man-made ephemera, and she often made experiments in her darkroom, layering negatives to an elegant and often mildly psychedelic effect....Not that long ago, Maya and I sat on my sofa drinking tea and eating chocolate while she showed me the photographs of her recent wall painting in progress. Watching the painting get built, I had difficulty reconciling the the fact that the painter was also the photographer, and I thought about the primary image and its documentary manifestation while Maya talked about the people she met and the bicycle she rode through Koln. It was kind of like watching stop-motion animation, and in this instance the subject of the film was an enormous, acid-colored explosion of energy emerging from the center of a wall. We looked at two images of the completed work, one in ordinary light and one bathed in the black light from the lamps she installed on the sides of the mural. The third image of the completed painting included Maya herself. No longer behind the camera documenting the process, she stands at the mid-point of the painting, its radiating gestures emanating outward from her solar plexus, from her chakras, from all kinds of ancient-new age parts of her body. Her head is slightly flung back. Her eyes are averted from the camera, and a little grin animates her face–triumphant, her arms are flung upward and outward, encompassing the world.