Andrea Dezsö doses folk art with feminism Issue #38

By Joanne Hinkel
Published: December 1st, 2008 | 12:00am

Andrea Dezsö is an artist who has a talent for making you feel at home and lost all at once. Using the most intimate methods — embroidery, illustration, artist books, painted journals — Dezsö draws viewers into her surreal world, where they can lose themselves in memories of her childhood both dreamt and real; the Jewish folk tales that were a part of her Eastern European upbringing, and Kafka-esque tales of her own metamorphoses in the city.

This power of storytelling and a distinctive illustration style have been the two constants in a career marked by very diverse projects; from illustrating and custom-embroidering the cover of McSweeney’s Issue #23; to designing a mural for the Bedford Park Boulevard subway station in the Bronx; to “Lessons from My Mother,” an embroidery installation which was arguably the most popular piece at the Museum of Art & Design’s “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery” show in winter of 2007.

The 48 embroideries in “Lessons” earned critical praise for honoring a historically feminine craft while pointing out the untruths and myths that a society can also hand down to its women. These humorous and startling beliefs (about sexuality, health, and courtship) such as “My mother claimed that eating greasy food without bread is what gives people Herpes,” were stitched alongside body parts and diagrams of bodily functions. Dezsö started the project when she first arrived in New York in 1997 as a method to work through her frustration with the rampant misogynism in the Romanian society she had left behind.

Venus Zine caught up with Dezsö while she was finishing up an artist-in-residency program at Kamiyama in Tokushima, Japan. She told us that Japan was proving to be inspirational to her, particularly visually, as the light and ambient colors are so muted because of the fog. She was sketching daily as she sat in Japanese cafés, and was surprised to find herself impressed not by Japan’s beautiful nature, but by the places abandoned by people. “I am photographing ugly, modern concrete buildings, schools, swimming pools, abandoned yards in the village and cities — and then re-assembling them into sets of imaginary streets and cities which I photograph ... because they remind me so much of my childhood neighborhood in Romania,” Dezsö said. “It almost feels as though I’m creating a portable version of my long-abandoned home.”

Since the 39-year-old artist grew up in the housing developments of a then-communist Transylvania, and has lived the last ten years as a working artist and Parsons professor in New York City, it is not surprising that a tension between belonging and longing pervades her artwork. The narrative most often follows the journey of a lost girl trying to find her way. Who is this girl? “Just a girl,” Dezso says. “Anyone. Me?”

Early next year, Dezsö brings her rebellious girl-meets-artist book concept to life with “A Demon Bridegroom,” a puppetry animation piece slated to debut at the St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Labapalooza Festival in Brooklyn. The festival has become the cutting-edge event in puppetry in the U.S. — and marks the culminating event for Puppet Lab Fellows’ yearlong research projects.

Inspired by a mystical Jewish tale, as told by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslave, Dezsö’s puppetry animation spin on “The Demon Bridegroom” takes things to Bridezilla territory: The story is now about a young factory worker who becomes possessed by the devil as she prepares for her wedding day — and Dezsö takes this tale into a very, exiting Tim Burton-esque, cinematic place. “Working with time-based media and adding movement and sound to my work has been very appealing,” she says. “I wanted to see what would it be like to work with these added layers of complexity, if I’d be able to create something meaningful.”

“I hope people will walk away from ‘The Demon Bridegroom’ with a sense of joy, a sense of wonder we all knew as children but rarely connect with as adults.”

In a decade when Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis could win over the mainstream, it’s plausible that this could be Dezsö’s era to shine as a post third-wave version of Frida Kahlo — though with a commitment to Eastern European folklore instead of Mexican folk history, of course.