UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Lesia Sochor, Nora Tryon, Natasha Mayers, Pat Wheeler

Lesia Sochor

Love of my ancestral homeland and horror at the merciless, brutal unprovoked invasion of Ukraine compelled me to paint images of Babushkas. This iconic symbol of a culture stirs memories of my mother, who in her later years wore one most every day. In painting this image I bear witness and stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. The paintings are an homage to the bereft women who have lost their husbands, children, sisters, brothers, and all those they hold dear. I paint this image as a form of protest, as a form of empowerment, to speak up and give me hope. With each painting I send out a message of Peace, Freedom, and that Ukraine lives!

I seek to make the paintings beautiful while maintaining strong symbolic and political statements. They are meant to provoke curiosity and have an emotional impact. In some of the paintings I use the Cyrillic alphabet, and the blue and yellow colors of the flag. One image portrays Ukrainian embroidery, vyshyvanka, to celebrate its distinct identity and rich culture. Another painting recalls a time when Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of the world. I use wheat as a symbol of sustenance and interconnectedness between all of humanity.

The images plead to have peace and freedom in their beloved country—a beleaguered nation that has endured a traumatic history, but one which, since 1992, has embraced democracy and independence. It is a nation building on the principles of political, social, and religious freedoms, which wanted to pursue peace and gave up its nuclear weapons. It is a nation wanting to steer its own course with dignity, with a president who cares for his people and for making Ukraine productive, prosperous, and progressive. It is a nation rich in culture and traditions and joyous hardworking people.

I am filled with pride at being Ukrainian. I am thankful to my immigrant refugee parents, who in the Philadelphia diaspora, continued the language and traditions which I have carried on with my own children. I am reliving their stories as I listen and watch the dreadful devastation of an unsuspecting country.

I condemn this war, I condemn the man behind it. The unthinkable is happening and my heart breaks. I want people to not forget this fight. Slava Ykraina.

 

Nora Tryon

My sketchbook is saving me: drawing, drawing, drawing. The ideas bombard me in my sleep. I wake up exhausted. Analysis of the takeover fills my head. Words of alarm, of warning, of disgust, stream through the speakers on the TV. Cable news pundits give their best shot at nailing down the latest catastrophe and my brain sifts through the rubble of breaking news for images that make sense, that ring true.

The billionaire boys’ club dances across the screen, provoking me with their deliberate cruelty, and satisfied smirks. The great shakedown takes down democracy. Their hands are in our pockets, or worse, in our bank accounts and our retirement funds. Social Security? National security? Basic human security? Games that are being played defy logic and all that I thought we stood for.

Palestinians are pawns to be whisked away, disappeared, to make space for a fairytale vacation resort, scrubbed, sanitized, transformed. A place I never want to see and hope will never be a real thing. But reality is not what the billionaires are selling. They are selling hate, fear, and division.

Back to the drawing boards, a visual vocabulary emerges, hands reach out, hold on, hold back, stitch together, support, console, rebuild. For the moment, hope lives.

 

Natasha Mayers

Quoting myself from an earlier exhibit statement in 2018:

When you view my work, I hope that you will get more in touch with your unease about what’s going on, and sense the emergency and the madness of it, and then go and change the world or get arrested or make more art.

 

I’m expressing my outrage and disappointment about what’s happening in the world, trying to transform the anger that so many of us are feeling about power imbalances and injustice. I try to talk about what is scary and threatening to me/us with a touch of irony, humor, pattern, exuberant color, and eccentricity.

But in 2024–25:

Overwhelming sadness and grief and shock and anger at our complicity in genocide and utter terror about the fascist present(ce) have banished the irony, humor, exuberant color, and eccentricity.

 

Curtains of falling bodies, human trash heaps, figures submerged and stacked—humanitarian crises, collective disasters, cultural chaos.

 

Artist bearing witness to, sounding warnings about, counting the victims of: ethnic cleansing, deportations, endless wars, extinction of species.

 

Making art about our paralysis, collective unwillingness, ignorance.

 

A world in trouble, the curtain is coming down. It’s the final act.

 

Pat Wheeler

These photos document some of the resistance to war and mass shootings of our children in schools and actions by those of us who live in Maine. The quilt is titled Security Blanket and was made in response to a demonstration at Georgetown Law. (I think they have it in their permanent collection but I definitely know I exhibited the quilt at Georgetown Law.)

The Enough demonstration took place in Blue Hill in response to mass shootings, especially Lewiston. The Liberty/Security quote I believe is from Benjamin Franklin.