Opening: Annalise Gratovich: Carrying Things From Home

Printmaker Annalise Gratovich’s graphic iconography employs symbols of personal and cultural identity, signaling togetherness through a scattered Ukrainian diaspora.

The figures in her work are totemic beings that explore personal and cultural identity; vessels based on the form of the stacking matryoshka doll. They are adorned in textiles and patterns informed by Indigenous Ukrainian textiles, embroidery, and ceremonial dress, as well as vintage American western wear. “The patterns are used to allude to distant homelands- places that are lost or cannot be returned to,” Gratovich says. Flora and fauna of the American South and Southwest adorn and surround her figures, rooting them in place and symbolizing interdependency, resiliency, and generational survival.

Her hand-carved woodcuts take months to complete, and are then meticulously colored with hand-dyed papers—a process that can take more than a month. She prints these by hand at Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas with a team of three to four other printers. The process of dyeing and cutting the paper to adorn these prints with color is evocative of traditional arts of Ukraine including the dyed egg (pysanky), and slavic papercuts (vytynanky).