We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rachel Yurkovich. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rachel below.

Rachel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My art happens in phases that become their own series. The latest endeavor is a video series titled Foreign Bodies. It started as me capturing short video clips (kind of like live photos) of scenes where the human-made and nature go where we don’t want them to go. They are scenes such as a dead animal on the road or a plastic bag caught in a plant. Captured by phone or DSLR, I eventually collected many of these from occurrences I pass in daily life and a bigger theme emerged. It’s meaningful to me because it makes us notice things we may normally look over in our everyday life and question.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in Northern Macedonia and Czechia, but my parents are originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Visual art was always an interest, from kindergarten drawings of people and trees to dark high school art expressing teenage angst in sculptures. I came back to Clevleand for college at the Clevleand Institute of Art and stuck around. I majored in Sculpture and Painting, but I ended up making video work for my final show. The sculpture turned into video because of my love for various materials and the way that material and action can be symbolic. For example, I was interested in how delicious things can suddenly become gross, depending on the context. So I filmed the action of me eating a dropped ice cream code off of the ground (Five Second Rule) and the action of worms eating a caramel apple (Sugarcoated).

I have continued making moving images as well as word collages in the last few years. For the physical work, I combine cut-out words from old magazines and books to form poetic pieces. The words brokenly express the frustration of our current dystopian-like time: what we are doing to nature and ourselves, the effects of the latest pandemic, as well as how digital media has absorbed and changed our culture.

I am happy about recent opportunities I had to show newer work at Cleveland galleries where my videos and word collages were displayed next to each other allowing viewers to make connections between the two types of work. I am also glad for more ways people can have access to obtaining some of this art; whether by purchasing a physical collage or a digital NFT.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Over the last two years, I have tried to generally stay up-to-date on the NFT world. One resource I found useful was InPeak, which has weekly video sessions on web3 topics. I first started learning about NFTs when someone mentioned to me that my short video loops would work well as NFTs. At that point, it felt like many artists looked down on the medium. As a video artist, I do see the usefulness of it; I see it as a certificate of authenticity with a piece of artwork you buy. Which is hard to come by with digital art that can just be copied. However, NFTs have evolved into so much more than this, being used as a key to get into communities, get access to physical features, and more. Eventually, I ended up creating NFT versions of many of videos from my Foreign Bodies series on the Foundation NFT marketplace.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Yes, the general theme seems to be witnessing what we as humans are doing to ourselves and the planet – the negative effects. And seeing the human vs nature tangle that happens. Trying to document moments of this that may normally be overlooked or forgotten to ponder. I want us to use our brains to a better potential.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rachelyurkovich.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelyurkovich.art/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rachelyurkovich.art/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rachelyurkovichart/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/rachelyurkovich
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RachelYurkovich_Art
• Other: https://foundation.app/collection/foreignbodies