Intertwined Intimacy

Lacey Vanya

Michael Vanya

Collaboration is its own rare art, a challenge to what has been assumed to be the definitive selfishness of the individual artist. But for the couple who have assumed the shared name of the Vanyas, it is at the center of their practice. They understand the joint fashioning of their work as contributory rather than competitive. It is not always clear, even to them, who has begun a particular piece or who has completed it.

The precise edges of oil pastel that they favor in their works on paper are not the equivalent of those strict boundaries that we are likely to associate with separate identities. It is more like they are writing each other’s biographies in the flourishing aquatic images that emerge from their collective efforts.

They do engage in solitary efforts from time to time, as in Michael’s ink renderings of semi-sharks, inscribed with metaphysical questions. But even these are preparations for the creatures which they create in common, surreal enough to be actually found in nature, perhaps some surviving fossil fishes that are kin to the coelacanth.

The intertwined intimacy of their work is being given spectacularly literal form in a woven cocoon sculpture. Threaded and painted, this accumulative object creates an image of its own in the drips and splashes and spills that mark the canvas lying beneath it. The result can easily be imagined as the artists’ gift to each other; neither of them makes it, yet both of them do.

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