Maya Ciarrocchi, Suchuwola, Cyanotype on Watercolor Paper, 18 X 24"

Cyanotype on Watercolor Paper, 18 X 24"

Maya's first visual project coalesced around the theme of vanished places. This interest, along with her Ashkenazi ancestry, led her to an artist residency in Poland. This residency in turn let her to the discovery of Yizkor books, and to a research project that intersected with oral history.

"I was looking at maps from the Yizkor books, which were drawn from memory ...this is my village, and this is where we lived. This is where we shopped...Because it's from memory it's subjective, it's not accurate. A map is an abstraction. It's how we humans have divided up our environment to sort of control it, to find our way through it."

Here a wooden synagogue is overlaid with the map of a shtetl. Steeped in subjective memory, Maya's Wooden Synagogues series reach deep into generational memory. Her superimpositions forge a new pictorial palimpsest of a cultural space and the structures and lives embedded in it. 

Steadfast has prints 2/3 and 3/3 of this Limited Edition.