YELENA YEMCHUK: УYY
УYY is an acronym for Україна - the Slavic word for Ukraine - followed by the initials of Yelena Yelena Yemchuk, the author of the book exhibited in PaperLab Gallery.
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The book by the Ukrainian-born artist and photographer is a personal testimony which tells humorous yet disturbing stories from a country at war, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. The project brings together the author's photographs, her personal archive and her own paintings. The images evoke a timeless, dreamlike world where we are wandering through childhood memories and visions, captivated by a mysterious sense of nostalgia for people and places we don't even know. Yelena Yemchuk conveys emotions with ironic lightness, yet tells poignant stories of childhood, freedom and war. Her work is multidimensional, not only in the subjects she depicts, but also with the various mediums she is working with - painting, drawing, photography and film.
Yelena Yemchuk was born in Kiev and moved with her parents to the United States at the age of eleven. Her interest in photography began as a teenager, when she received a 35 mm Minolta camera for her fourteenth birthday. She studied fine art at Parsons in New York and later studied Photography at Art Center in Pasadena. She is both an active artist and a fashion photographer. Her work is often published in prestigious magazines and his photographs have appeared in the New Yorker, among others, Another Magazine, ID, Dazed & Confused, and Vogue, and her paintings and photographs have been exhibited worldwide.
She has published several photo books. YYY is now on display at PaperLab Gallery which was nominated for the Paris Photo/Aperture First book Prize in 2022.