the CCAL
- Nov 2, 2020
- 3 min read

November 2020 Presenter: Olga Yukhno

We invite you to join us at our meeting on Monday Nov 16, 2020 for fun and fellowship! This is our monthly members meeting. Hope to see you there - members and guests welcome!

Due to COVID and in light of increased safety and social distancing guidelines, we are (for now) going digital. So, we're bringing this meeting to you online - straight to your home studio or sofa, so we can stay connected during these unprecedented times. Our online presenter for this meeting will be Olga Yukhno taking us on a great tour of USC's McMaster Gallery. Come learn with us and experience this great virtual tour!

To keep the business meeting shorter, please review the information provided by our President regarding Board business activities and decisions prior to the meeting by clicking HERE.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89404936824

The Zoom session will open at 6:45pm

The Presentation will begin at 7pm

(See Zoom link details at bottom of this post)

Photo of McMaster Gallery — McMaster Gallery

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Olga Yukhno

Olga Yukhno is an artist originally from Pyatigorsk, Russia. It was in Russia her passion for art began. Inspired by the culture of her home country, she started by working with batiques, stained glass and enameling. She studied under world renowned enamellist, Nikolai Vdovkin for several years to hone her skills, before moving to the United States in 2008.

In the US, she no longer had access to the tools needed to continue with her enameling, and quickly started expanding into any and every new medium she could get access to. What she fell in love with was ceramic sculpting. It allowed her to experiment, and fuse together old-world artistry with her skills and abilities across a wide variety of art forms to create totally new and unique mixed media pieces. Over the years, Olga has traveled to over 40 countries across Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, and visited museums ranging from the world famous Louvre in France, to the smallest unnamed art displays in towns and villages few outsiders have ever seen. It is in these travels she gets the most inspiration, drawing on the uniqueness and culture of every new place she visits, she finds ways to incorporate those cultural nuances into each new piece she makes. The colors, shapes, and ideas of everything from tribal masks to modern street art can be seen woven into her work. She loves juxtaposition in her art, old and new, lustrous and weathered, and it’s in these contrasts she finds beauty.

Currently her work is a mixture of three dimensional ceramic and mixed media wall pieces, figurative sculpture, and larger scale installation works. The process used to create many of her signature looks is achieved by hand pressing each individual impression into the clay using small custom made metal tools. She hand makes all of these tools herself out of repurposed architectural metal scraps. She also loves to incorporate found objects, as well as utilize techniques from other art forms she’s studied and practiced, such as weaving, encaustic and metal working. The result of this process, different incorporated elements and techniques are what create her unique and visually interesting personal style. Her degree in psychology shapes the ideas and concepts behind many of her pieces, with the intention that observing her work encourages the viewer to think more about what they’re seeing, and the emotions it evokes.

https://www.olgayukhno.com/

McMaster Gallery

McMaster Gallery is dedicated to promoting visual art as a tool and a channel for education within the university and the community. The gallery hosts rotating exhibitions and programming that examine cultural and social contexts, challenge contemporary perceptions of art making, and provide a framework for intellectual and creative inquiry. The gallery is located at 1615 Senate Street and is free and open to the public Monday - Friday, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. The gallery is closed on weekends and all university holidays.