Ukrainian-born artist Yulia Pinkusevich, MFA ’12, says she came to Stanford as an “analog” painter. But she didn’t leave that way—alongside her art classes, she took design and engineering courses, including ME318: Computer-Aided Product Creation. “That course really focused my work in a new direction,” Pinkusevich says.
A yearlong artist residency at the software company AutoDesk, at Pier 9 in San Francisco, enabled her to further explore the connections between art and technology; the program brings in artists and designers, sets them up with high-tech manufacturing machines and “lets them loose.”
Photo: Courtesy Yulia PinkusevichWhile there, Pinkusevich discovered a process of “etching away paint to create an image,” a reductive process whereby she would spend a week layering between 10 and 50 coats of paint onto plywood before putting into a machine bit images that told it where and what to carve from the layers. The process revealed colors, images and marks made by her hand but buried within.
The results—an exploration of Martian landscapes and “future utopian ideas for where humanity is going”—were on display this fall at a solo exhibition at Kent Fine Art in New York. Pinkusevich also recently co-designed the popular sculptural seating at Stanford’s McMurtry Building, the new home of the art and art history department.
