it’s me, Yaffa

Hi

Yaffa Chaya is a Jewish American artist working in PA and NYC. She holds an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway through a fully funded national Mitchell scholarship. She specializes in figurative portraiture and storytelling, and has exhibited across Ireland and the US.

Working primarily in oil on canvas, she documents by reporting the body as a site of feeling. Paint is handled with messy gestures and exposés. Brushstrokes are left visible, backgrounds bleed into figures, and raw canvas shows at the edges. Her work puts private moments of isolation in a covid and post covid world in conversation with public Jewish identity, the domestic with the communal, the individual body with the body politic.

Watch this space for upcoming works about Jewish American motherhood, where the foreground figure is intimate and particular (a specific child, a specific body, a specific moment of exhaustion or prayer), while the background is symbolic and collective: the Orthodox Jewish figures in New York City subway cars who carry an entire visual world of religious life into the secular everyday. These backgrounds ask the figures to hold more than their own story. This upcoming series extends visual logic into the subject matter: a toddler reciting a Hebrew blessing she cannot yet understand, surrounded by a teacher and a friend who are not Jewish; a baby newly woken, still in his sleep sack, surrounded by open, bleeding pomegranates - fullness, abundance, exposure. These are paintings about what gets passed down and what gets lost, about what it costs to be visible, and about what the ordinary moments of Jewish American motherhood contain when you look at them long enough to paint them, and how the present and past merge in a postmemory descent.