excerpted from jivata sutras

And in Yashna’s work we see ourselves, all of the emotions we tried to obscure, vivid and abundant. Yashna, 30 year old artist, yoga instructor and adult literacy veteran, offers a brave model of healing and release. While we are busy hiding away our pain, Yashna takes it out of the shadows.  She puts her pain/our pain on the wall.  This is heart work, hard work, her art work, asking us to map and traverse our hearts, even and especially the most tender parts, the most recently and repeatedly bruised tissue. This is hard work, your art work, heart work.

Appropriately, Yashna’s installation was centered and grounded by an altar in the remembered heat at the hearth of a closed fireplace.   Altar as verb.  This altar in it’s kinship with all, performs alteration, the spirit of faith and change. The altar means that anything can change.  Even your heart.   The centering altar featured art books cataloging Yashna’s lifetime practice of expressing love through art, storybook collages from her transition out of her job at the Durham Literacy Center, pens and paper for attendees to write love notes and good wishes for her ongoing journey and most importantly Yashna’s open heart, the site of transformation.

Love is powerful.  Healing is possible.  These are the first things to know.  Yashna’s palm framed photo of her changing face, a study for a painting of her happiness yet to come, alongside an anatomically correct painted map called “heart of a 30 year old woman after break up” teaches us that the dream of healing follows the fact of the body.  Healing is specific and felt.  Hearts really do break and have to be mended, for our survival.  But love survives   Yashna’s heart map points out the scared places, the scarred places, the sacred places, the repeated “oh god oh god oh god” behind the major artery reminds us that the places that shock rattles, where disbelief flutters up again and again are also the places that transformation moves through, divine in our apprehension.   This heart, becomes three dimensional with white splotches, bright red paths of texture.   “You” are somewhere in this heart.  There is a feather-light place for friends and the word yes.  There is the maze of details, and the labyrinth of embodiment to walk again and again.