Exhibition runs May 23 – June 29 2013
SPECIAL EVENTS:
* Artist Reception: Saturday May 25 4-9pm
* Artist Talk: Saturday June 8 5pm
* Oakland Art Murmur First Friday: June 7 6-9pm
* New! Third Thursday! June 20 6-8pm
Jody Medich‘s series of pencil and charcoal drawings come from a long-held very intrapersonal place where reality and media images merge. Of her family she says “We come from an area right on the border between Austria and Hungary…and survived two world wars in limbo between two evils: the Nazis and the Communists. As a young child [my family] wanted me to know how to survive in the face of hell. They tried to save me by telling me stories.”
Image: Jody Medich “Grandma” (2012) pencil on paper 30″x36″. Photo by the artist.
Grandmother aunts uncles and parents told of traumatic experiences: taking beatings to protect Jews and Christians hidden in the cellar; where to hide when soldiers came to the door and to never peek out no matter what; and showing scars from concentration camps and the Gulag for resisting ideology of the oppressor. Telling these stories to a child the adults left out details but the artist’s active imagination filled in the terrifying blanks envisioning the stories through the imagery of old war and noir movies her father liked which she describes as “…disturbing and sinister made all the more terrifying because of what they do not show.”
Jody Medich was born in South Bend IN grew up in Detroit MI and has lived in the Bay Area since 2001. She received an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. Medich has exhibited throughout the Bay Area is a member of the art group Five Ton Crane and the co-founder and creative director of the design firm Kicker Studio.