Color and Emotion at Art Up in Margaretville

MARGARETVILLE — For Zena Gurbo, the artist whose one woman show is now on at Art Up in Margaretville,  social work and art are forever intertwined.  In the past,  Gurbo divided her time between taking care of people with disabilities and engaging in her creative practice.  In her show Temple of the Forgotten Parts her creative practice takes the lead. In this show  of   vibrant mixed-media work, rendered mostly in acrylic, Gurbo has created brightly colored bodies surging  with emotion, spilling out of frames  and off discarded paper Amazon bags. They are bodies filled  with archetypes and symbols-- almost more than you can take in in one viewing.   She works with recycled materials and stream of consciousness, art influenced by psycho-therapy and the human experience.  Gurbo reveals that most of the works in “Temple of the Forgotten Parts” are projections of her own feelings. revealing the multiple parts inside herself.  She maps the images: ancestral trauma, personal and universal history, healing,  storing them all into these “pink voids.”

“I use the pink form as the beginning of an inner journey,” says the artist, who traces her body in different positions on each piece.  These forms are the containers through which she interrogates her own psyche.  Talisman and symbols represent emotions and states of mind:  : eyes erupt from the body evoking feelings of being surveilled and surveillance,  rabbits inspire  not only comfort but fear, “Rabbits are afraid,”  she says, and that duality is present in the two headed forms she creates to represent binary moods like joy and terror.  

“I make art as a way to regulate my parts and their emotions.” she says.  “from joy to depression.” 

Her images are inspired by the concept of Internal Family Systems.   According to  the concept of Internal Family Systems (IFS) each one of us contain  multiple parts of ourselves.  Each part has a distinct voice.  “No parts are bad,” stresses Gurbo.  A key part in this system is The Self, which is your true core, filled with calm, curiosity and compassion which heals the other parts of your inner system.  

The daughter of artists, with artist relatives all around, Gurbo finally was able to free her creativity by watching her “outsider art” students create.   “I could finaly see what unfettered creativity looked like. Through them, I was able to free myself.”  

Working from her home in Gilbertsville, Gurbo  has shown her work  in the Women in Art Exhibition at the Tom Kane Theater in Industry City, Brooklyn and the Treadwell Museum of Fine Art.  

She is currently going for her MSW at Binghamton University.  

“Temple of Forgotten Parts” runs through August 23 at Art Up in Margaretville