Yevgeniya Kaganovich is a Belarus born, Milwaukee, Wisconsin based artist, whose hybrid practice encompasses Jewelry and Metalsmithing, sculpture and installation. Yevgeniya has received a Masters of Fine Arts form the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Metal/Jewelry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yevgeniya has been an active art practitioner since 1992, exhibiting her work nationally and internationally. Her work has received a number of awards and has been published widely. Yevgeniya has worked as a Designer/Goldsmith at Peggie Robinson Designs, Studio of Handcrafted Jewelry in Evanston, Illinois and has taught Metalsmithing at Chicago State University, Chicago, Illinois, and Lill Street Studios, Chicago, Illinois. Currently Yevgeniya is a Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee heading a thriving Jewelry and Metalsmithing Area with a graduate and undergraduate programs.
About Yevgeniya’s Work
In my current work I explore wearable forms utilizing reused plastic bags as a base material. Soft and playful, these pieces juxtapose the discarded artificial material with organic forms in various formats of jewelry we come to associate with preciousness. Instead of containing something precious, the wearable object itself implies preciousness, juxtaposing the idea of preciousness against the discarded artificial material it is made out of.
For the RJM Artist project, I received a number of plastic bags the unwanted jewelry was collected in, along with a variety of costume jewelry pieces. The colors in this work are defined by the colors of the collected plastic bags, while the forms develop based on the forms of the costume jewelry incased in their entirety. Some crocheted “cozies” stretch over and hug tight to the original forms, while others bulge out over the original decorative elements in plastic-bag-stuffed volumes. Some pieces utilize the original earring and pin back findings to adhere the new objects to the body, while others incase entire objects like pendants, with only a suggestion of the original form evident. The new objects are physically weighted with the original pieces of jewelry to make us consider what it means to carry these materials on our bodies.
I use a traditional craft process, crocheting, to contrast the slow labor intensive making with the speed of refuse. These materially and time-dense objects are physical manifestations of numerous bags discarded and time spent in a futile attempt to reclaim them.
