CURRENTS

"Fantastic Journey"

An Illustrative Story by

Katia Jirankova Levanti

Through February 28

OPENING RECEPTION

FRIDAY, FEB. 6, 6-8PM

A Czech artist now residing between Waterford and Prague, was born to a Russian mother and Czech father. Her childhood was marked by flights to Moscow to visit her maternal grandmother, a famous actress from Stanislavsky's legendary theater. Though they were cautious not to flaunt their Russian in public, her and her mother, Lena, always felt most at home in their mother tongue. But in Prague the atmosphere was icy. Vaclav Havel was still musing a long way from his presidency of the 90's, and Katia's father's artistic genius was gaining him no friends in the communist ranks. He was a political, satirical cartoonist who was more than once prohibited from working and forced to live off the small income of Lena's translations alone. Some of the most progressive minds in the country would congregate in Katia's childhood home, well aware of the bugs planted in the walls by the secret police, and aware of a privacy relegated solely to thoughts expressed below a whisper amongst themselves, or through the most cunning means (Such as through children's cartoons, which her father also became famous for). These comrades would later become Havel's minister of foreign affairs, another the prime minister, and her father was honored by the president himself as a foremost prominent figure of Czech culture. These were the environs which molded Katia's artistic ambitions and memories. She studied Philosophy and linguistics at Prague's Charles University and Universita per Stranieri, Perugia, Italy and later with the great Boris Jirku, then Professor at the Praque's prestigious Art Conservatory. The meditative, trance-like state from which her work comes is the birth ground of epiphany itself and Katia brings forth her visions of a world even more secretive and unknown than those magical streets of her Prague childhood.