Yana Bondar is an artist from Augusta, GA, currently residing in Athens, GA. She graduated with a BFA from Augusta University. Her upbringing in the Catholic Church, the identity of womanhood within the Catholic faith, and her identity as an Asexual, Aromantic feminine coded person created an existential paradox, solidifying her fascination with the self-destructive duality pervasive in many aspects of life. 

The emotional honesty of narrative and character/archetypal depiction in contemporary Japanese commercial art is an integral part to both the artist as a person and her work. Bondar juxtaposes aesthetic and theoretic aspects of this kind of ‘throwaway entertainment medium’ with western visual cultures of wealth and power.

Byzantine and Medieval clerical aesthetics to further this ‘sense of God’ in a narrative that subverts the validity of that institution while also creating an anachronistic space for women’s divinity and virtue that isn’t inherently tied to motherhood. In this, there is an underlying sense of healing in her work that she intends to extend beyond narrative and into practice.

Gentle Sadness: It’s a feeling like the quiet hum in your heart before you start to cry but suspended indefinitely; kind of like sleeping, kind of like rotting. 

My work explores this sense in the context of resistant apathy through multiple perspectives of femininity (Catholic Femininity, Toxic/Self-Destructive Femininity, 'eternal' Girlhood). I explore this intersection of individual and collective identities in my work by isolating and emphasizing narrative archetypes from various sources ranging from biblical to contemporary commercial medias and toy franchises. The figures in my work exist in full awareness of their composite identities; built for an ambiguous agenda, yet apathetically acknowledge that they can never attain their own agency or personhood. They exist for a purpose or service, as sacrificial vessels, but in reality there are many parallels to the narrative and cultural identity of Catholic Womanhood. Narratives are written to offer guidance and modeling through life. Writing a narrative is both a constructive vision of future and an ethical dilemma. When a narrative is created, whom is it created for and what consequences will it bring into the world? Mystery is one of our greatest fears yet it exists in every aspect of our experience. We try to mediate it through ideations, changing a confusing gradient of events into black and white distinctions. I channel this through various feminine forms that exist as archetypes rather than characters, exploring isolated feminine interiority in anachronistic material reverence with a contemporary perspective. 

The context and conceptuality of my work is currently being expanded to include social practice and community participation through ritual performance and online engagement. Through bringing others into performances of my own personal narratives, I intend to gain a deeper understanding of how we as individuals collectively propel ourselves through day-to-day existence. By donning an identity outside of myself and outside of the archetypes that exist in cultural collective consciousness, I actively give up parts of my humanity in the public space. That with no assigned role is like a ghost, that with no simplified identity is too difficult to understand, that with no connection to - (generalized, collective) ME - is not fully human until a connection is built.