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."
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." www.jodymedich.com
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.
Image: Jody Medich "Grandma" (2012) pencil on paper, 30"x36". Photo by the artist.
Show Dates: 05/23/2013 - 06/29/2013
Mercury 20 Gallery
475 25th St.
Oakland, CA
510-725-9758
