This is how this fascinating newcomer to the Ottawa Valley art scene urges viewers to approach his artworks. It is good advice. Whether the piece is a bronze and stainless-steel sculpture, a graphite drawing, or rendered in ink or acrylic paints, Kaplunovich creates works replete with images and interpretations. Your experience will be limited only by your own imagination; his seems to have no bounds.
Yuri’s art is open-ended, never exhausted in meaning as you perceive and explore the endless possibilities it contains. Each time you return to a piece you discover new worlds of images and connections and suggestions — invitations to inhabit his extraordinary way of seeing. You will be seduced into looking again because each time you do, you will see more.
The multiple layers of imagery and complexity are the result of his process. As he describes it, “I work from a simple premise: an image is not imposed upon a surface but discovered within it. Every surface I make has never existed before and will never exist again. The torch, the metal, the heat, the moment. It cannot be repeated…”
A Fish Is a Fish Until…
His current collection focuses on fish as his subject, comprising works in graphite, ink, acrylic and bronze. But he doesn’t create an image of a fish. Somehow he discovers “the fish that was already living inside the metal or the paper, waiting to be seen.” He is able to see, or sense, and portray the ancestry — the history of the alligator char and the death carried inside the beauty of the fugu fish. A fish is a fish until it is being rendered in Yuri Kaplunovich’s hands, because he envisions and interprets images differently. He works from the impulse that drove our ancestors to inscribe the images of animals they envisioned onto the stone surfaces of caves. He describes it as “a need to give form to what exists beneath language… a perceptual style where forms emerge through sustained material negotiation rather than predetermined design.” It explains why viewers report seeing different images each time they return to one of his works.
Perception itself shifts with attention. That certainly was my experience as I admired his art in all its various forms. This artist brings an unusual way of seeing to his work that invites — no, demands — an unusual way of contemplation. His education in textile design and art history gave him “… a second language, one built from ornamental pattern, architectural form, and the visual cultures of civilizations I studied before I had seen them.” As the work proceeds, he describes the flow that embraces him: “… interior worlds emerge that I did not plan — landscapes from childhood, architectural fragments from art history, ornamental structures from textile education. While the imagery surfaces intuitively, I guide it through decisions of structure, balance, and material. A gecko appears inside a halibut not by accident and not by calculation, but through disciplined attention to what the drawing is becoming. These are not inventions. They are discoveries made with full authorship.” If you look again, you will see more.
Kaplunovich studied at art school in Kherson, Ukraine, from the age of seven. His father was a tapestry artist and his older brother was studying textile design. As Yuri characterized it, “Creativity was the language we spoke in this family.” At seventeen he moved to Vitebsk, Belarus, to attend the Belarusian Academy of Design, where he completed his MA in Textile Design and where he met his future wife, Galina. They married when Yuri was twenty, and they now have a daughter, Anna, who lives in Toronto.
His professional foundry and metal fabrication experience ensued when the couple spent five years in Israel where he worked making sculptures at the Omanut Foundry. Then the couple moved to Toronto with their young daughter and Yuri began a twenty-two-year career at Artcast, an art foundry in Halton Hills, where he specialized in bronze casting, casting assembly, chasing and fine finishing, wax making, and welding, gaining deep experience in various fabrication processes and patination. (Local residents will be interested to know that Yuri was part of the team that created Perth’s beloved bronze statue of Big Ben and Ian Millar in full flight over a 5-½ foot jump not far from Millar’s home and Ben’s final resting place.)
That foundational expertise contributed to the couple’s decision a few years ago to find a home in the country where Yuri could build his own dedicated metal fabrication studio in which he could create large-scale sculptures. He is eager to apply his hard-earned capabilities and experience to give birth to a new collection of pieces that incorporate movement into his artistic language. They found the perfect spot in Glen Tay near Perth and began constructing their own innovative home designed by Galina, who is a brand designer and consultant. Yuri plans to have his workshop/studio operational by the end of this year.
In the meantime, he has just launched an incredibly informative and well-designed website at yurikaplunovich.com. Right now this is the only way you can fully appreciate why he (and I) implore you to “Please look again — you will see more.” There is one additional possibility. On June 6 and 7th Yuri Kaplunovich is participating in the annual Riverdale ArtWalk in Toronto at the Jimmie Simpson Park at Queen St. E. and Booth Ave. Don’t forget to clip and save his Artist Trading Card at the top of this page, and watch for the opening of his metal fabrication studio. When you are inevitably seduced by the images on his website, his contact information is available there.
