Full Essay by Bella Bonner-Evans

“Girlhood is a story of desire; innocence; fall from innocence…There's so much storytelling in girlhood. There's so much revision in telling it”. ― Jenny Zhang (Quote from an interview with OFFICE Magazine, 2017)

This quote by American writer and essayist Jenny Zhang, a commentary on her debut short story collection Sour Heart (2017), epitomises the themes at the heart of Olya Avstreyh’s debut exhibition with SERENE Gallery in Lugano, Switzerland. Exploring immigrant adolescent experience through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City, Sour Heart conjures the awkward, anxiety-driven, dislocated and at times disturbing reality of the in-between years - the period when one is neither an innocent child, nor a knowing adult; the crippling age when harsh truths dawn on unsuspecting ears and introspection is the only escape.

Russian-born and currently based in Israel, Avstreyh is no stranger to the displacement Zhang describes. Alienated by the recent acts of extreme violence performed by both her native and current home country’s governments, she has been on a journey inward since beginning her artistic career in earnest in 2020. While producing this expansive new body of work, a feverish, almost manic act, the artist returned to the predilections of her youth in an attempt to carve out a space of belonging - “I feel like I’ve come full circle”, she notes, “And I am running back to the things I’ve always loved: my tumblr, journaling, literature, absurdities, enigmas and daydreaming”. The outcome of this interior odyssey, ODD WINDS manifests the melancholic and introverted form of femininity that defined the latter part of this self-confessed late-bloomer’s teens and early twenties. Inherently rhizomatic, the deeply personal pieces on show represent an act of web-weaving akin to the re-blogging of images on a Tumblr page. Across the exhibition, the artist unashamedly recalls, revisits and intertwines the desperate yet formative cultural artefacts that she first accessed as a teen, and carries with her as an adult.

The titular painting, Odd Winds (2023) incarnates the fear and discomfort associated with the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It is an almost apocalyptic scene in which women flee against the wind as the sun drops low in the sky to produce a startling, almost fluorescent, twilight. Drawing from a quote by one of her life-long favourite authors, Virginia Woolf: “It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn…like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish…”, Avstreyh deploys sunset, a constant that marks the passage of time, as a metaphor for reluctant maturing. As the wind of change blows hard against these women, they push back in an attempt to avoid the inevitable ascent into womanhood that lies before them. The characters pictured can each be considered as manifestations of the artist herself, encapsulating her desire to sprint back into the past and remain forever on the cusp of adulthood.

The trauma of innocence lost underpins another piece on show: at luncheon parties before the war perhaps (2023). Featuring an androgynous figure in a rapturous state as they dine on escargot, this powerful work also relies heavily on the writing of Virginia Woolf. Its title is drawn from a section in A Room of One’s Own (1929) where Woolf notes the change in atmosphere after the First World War and questions whether Tennyson’s poems were, “what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war?”. She writes, “When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed?”. Motivated by the despair that Woolf describes, in at luncheon parties before the war perhaps (2023) Avstreyh explores the extent to which we can reclaim a youthful feeling of hope and promise once it has been desecrated by the realities of our world.

Avstreyh considers the central figure a manifestation of Orlando, a gender-switching courtier from Woolf’s book of the same name. Taking inspiration from the writer’s description of Orlando, as he awakens to find himself a woman: “so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft…all was doubt, all was confusion...through all these changes she remained fundamentally the same”, Avstreyh leaves her figure’s gender to the imagination. Combining feminised lips and eyes with the typically male attire of a shirt and tie, she invites us to reflect on the universality of feelings, in particular “doubt” and “confusion”, which transgress the binaries of gender. Seeing this quote also as an apt description of the complexities and inherent contradictions of adolescence, the artist renders a snail shell in the foreground as a metaphor for introversion. In including this symbolic device, Avstreyh reveals the message behind both this piece and, by extension, this body of work; the longing to understand oneself in the present, by looking back to the past.

Close-up renderings of faces lost in contemplation, Fever Dream (2023) and Pink Air (2023), speak to the vulnerability and uncertainty of girlhood by making subtle allusions to iconic, female-centric coming-of-age narratives. Easily correlated with the character of Bella Baxter in Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ alternative bildungsroman Poor Things (2024), Fever Dream (2023) can be understood to emulate Baxter’s recognisable costuming to inculcate the film's subject matter. A woman with the brain of an infant, Bella Baxter’s experience of accelerated adolescence is an extreme manifestation of the tribulations of the onslaught of womanhood, in particular the anxiety of bodily realities not being mirrored internally. Similarly, Pink Air (2023) is based on Nastassja Kinski’s performance in Tess (1979), Roman Polanski adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). Another tale of a young woman forced to rapidly face the realities of adulthood, Avstreyh deliberately naive brushwork and reliance on pink pigment underline Tess’s fragility and naivety - characteristics soon to be exploited by the men that surround her. Unlike in these fictions, however, the individuals pictured in Avstreyh’s pieces are irrevocably tethered to one time and place. Unable to become women they instead eternally encapsulate an uncomfortable yet promising moment of transition. In this way, they stand in for Avstreyh herself – they are each a metaphor for the narratives that informed her understanding of herself as a teenager, alongside her reluctance to leave these stories behind.

Drawing on a considerable range of eclectic source materials, in particular the cultural cornerstones of her youth, Olya Avstreyh’s ODD WINDS is a powerful excavation of self through which the artist unpicks the complex and nuanced tumultuousness of girlhood. The works on show are unfailingly motivated by Avstreyh's recent desire to turn inwards, brought forth by the unsettling realities of war and instability that currently surround her. At a moment when the future feels uncertain, the past becomes a necessary shelter in which to hide. Much like the shell pictured in at luncheon parties before the war perhaps (2023), on viewing ODD WINDS we are invited into Avstreyh’s safe space. As we enter SERENE Gallery, we are greeted with the immense kind of vulnerability that might otherwise only be found by scrolling through Avstreyh's tumblr or stumbling into her teenage bedroom. Upon leaving, we are armed with a new understanding of the artist and a renewed understanding of ourselves.