Home, Sweet, Home: Vessna Perunovich Examines Themes of Home in Emblems of the Enigma

Beautiful, dignified, luminous, deeply intelligent- artist Vessna Perunovich is the kind of woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

Here’s a story: Once upon a time, Vessna’s book, (W)hole, was on my coffee table. My date, we’ll call him Frank, thumbed through it while waiting for me to get ready. To me, the catalogue of eerie, dreamy emblems- hands, shoes, cords, blood, goo, fences- clearly spoke of exile, family, femininity, and political homelessness.

“Wow,” Frank said, as I emerged, ready to go, from the powder room. He was holding the book at arm’s length, as if it were contaminated. “Clearly, this is the artwork of a disturbed man hater!”

I was stunned. Despite the stellar chemistry and some genuine affection, it became crystal clear that we had nothing in common. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to date yet, after previous disasters. What do you do when someone doesn’t understand the concepts most sacred to you? Do we still live in that Freudian hell where women who aren’t mute are disturbed? Who could, in an instant, reduce all the power of politics, rootlessness, war, immigration, grief, and exile into the insecurity of the North American male?

On one level, this trivial tidbit doesn’t really matter in the long run. People like different things, right? People interpret things differently.

Yet on another level, it matters so much. It illuminates something remarkable about that elusive puzzle: why is art important?

We know in the deepest part of our soul that art is important. Whether it is hymns or Italian fashion design or Van Gogh’s sunflowers, it matters so very much.

How we respond to something, how we interpret something, reveals what our souls hide. And this gentleman’s soul hid some crazy fears about crazy artist women, and that made it loud and clear that a crazy artist woman like myself would never be understood or accepted by this person, no matter how great the date would go. If being a strong, creative artist who spoke against corruption and inequality and war meant you were disturbed …ultimately the person who thought this would see me this way, too.

Jet two years into the present. Vessna Perunovich’s retrospective and companion book, Emblems of the Enigma, was just on display at the Art Gallery of Mississauga last month, now traveling. Donald Brackett curates the show. (Vessna Perunovich: Emblems of the Enigma by Donald Brackett is available at Amazon online. Visit Vessna’s site at www.vessnaperunovich.com.)

To be fair, Vessna’s work IS disturbing. How could it be anything less? When you’re examining themes of identity and exile, coming from a place that no longer exists, then who are you? What does home mean if you can’t go home anymore? There is blood in this work, reflecting the questions of lineage and genes, the sick memories of war and corruption and destruction and death, and questioning life and the ties that bind. Blood- it is who we are, but who are we if we are torn from our families, our lovers, our land? This is not something lucky born-in-Canada people like myself can know. And that is why Vessna asks us to imagine it.

Brackett says, “Perunovich’s work …is able to make a deft commentary on our shared values as embodied creatures who require metaphysical as well as physical sanctuary. In fact, the search for sanctuary has become an emblem in itself for the multitude of miniature enigmas we all face on a daily basis.”

Most of her sculptures, paintings, installations and performance pieces use a limited colour spectrum of red, black, grey, white and beige. The emblems we see over and over again are bizarre, gooey shapes that feel cellular, biological, and faintly grotesque. Fences and ropes are prominent, suggesting physical limitations and bondage, representation of emotional or political barriers. Occasionally, a severed foot or hand appears, or scrawled, cryptic phrases that feel like dreams or nightmares.

Vessna at Nuit Blanche, 2007

There are no safe spaces for the audience: certainly nothing that’s merely pretty or decorative, and nothing that makes perfect, immediate sense. Why should interpretation be easy for the viewer? Millions of orphaned, lost, exiled, injured, tortured, raped, sick, scared, helpless immigrants and refugees the world over are struggling to make sense of their existence, forge an identity from rootlessness, from war and grief and silence and loss.

I ran into two young ladies at Vessna’s show. Their reaction to her work was completely different than Frank’s, and I watched them with fascination as they fearlessly examined the art and talked together with great excitement about what the work might mean.

The scene was straight out of a small-budget film about Canadian multiculturalism. The spacious gallery, almost empty near closing time, with eerie, bloody sculptures by a woman immigrant from the former Yugoslavia. The Canadian writer girl, fortunate to be born into the best country in the world,  thanks to the struggle of her own ancestors to escape execution after hiding Jews during the second world war. And two girlfriends, spending the afternoon looking at art together. The filmmaker could not project the exact ethnic background of the friends, but they are dark-skinned and beautiful and one girl is wearing a headscarf. Their names are Niwah and Arzoo. The writer is assuming that Niwah is of Indian descent, but can’t be sure. Arzoo says she is from Pakistan, but it doesn’t matter where she was born or lives, what matters is that she is Muslim, and this does not change. Niwah is a photographer, and Arzoo is a clinical researcher and poet.

There is a piece of art in one corner that features a book with a million red pinpricks throughout it. A bucket of latex gloves on the floor encourages tactile exploration. The women don the gloves, touch the book, and the red ink rubs off on their hands. They talk together about how it seems as if the book is in Braille, and that a blind person might be able to read it by touching it. That the unknown makes all of us blind. The red rubbing off on the gloves is the blood, one blood, of all of us here on earth.

I go over to take a look at the book. One of the girls hands me some gloves, excited for me to experience this book of life. I’m not sure if it is really supposed to suggest Braille, for the raised dots in the book are all uniform. Perhaps that signifies that there is only one language, one written in the blood on all of our hands, in all of our veins?

All three of us move onward, to a sculpture where red oozes in and out of two silver cups. The artist is not here, but the conversation nonetheless involves her. Four women, talking about the boundaries of love, sex, of blood, oozing in and out, creating ties and terror between lovers.

This is how the hypothetical Can-film scene ends: The writer waves to her new girlfriends, takes her coat, heads out into the gorgeous day, away from all the strange images of identities merged and severed, back to downtown Toronto where she lives and writes.

On the surface there is little to connect that writer to the art, or to the maker of this strange and profound work, beyond her girlish desire to have equally profound things to say, equal strength and creativity as that artist. But then there is that blood, oozing through all of us. Then there are those bonds, those ties, and those bizarre and cryptic connections that ravel and unravel the human race.

The writer is not entirely sure what brought her here, but it is part of that red string running through Vessna’s works. She first learned about the artist through a friend of a friend of a friend of her own husband, now dead.

He is the one who taught her to live without borders, who came from Serbia also, who bore witness to the exact climate of politics and identity of which Vessna speaks. His mind and spirit and blood and ashes are now permanently meshed with the writer. Two souls who belonged to one another. Home is where the heart is. Home sweet home, even in his absence.

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She also writes about food, mood, art, and literature. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.