Water Series
Holy Waters Book of Yona Ecology Rain Troubled Waters
Living Waters is a series in progress, addressing the massive plastic pollution killing our oceans and its sea creatures.
Some of the paintings will feature interactive elements with embedded videos.
Living Waters: Turtle eating Plastic. Acrylic on canvas, 26 x 40 inches
Living Waters: Crab in Plastic Bag. Acrylic on canvas, 26 x 40 inches
Trapped Turtle, Acrylic on Canvas, 30 x 30 inches
Sealife Sixpack, Acrylic on Canvas, 16 by 16 inches
Living Waters - Yellow Fish in Plastic Bag, Acrylic on Wood, 18 x 24 "
Plastic Eating Enzyme
Holy Waters is about healing amidst adversity. The works portray women who have survived abuse by Hamas, immersed underwater for spiritual cleansing and renewal. Encased in a womb-like bubble, they symbolize rebirth and separation from the mundane. Water, a source of life and purification, holds profound significance in Jewish tradition. Ritual immersion signifies transformation and renewal, echoing the resilience of these women.
Holy Waters I, Acrylic on Canvas, 40x40"
Holy Waters II, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x24"
Holy Waters III, Acrylic on Canvas, 40x40"
Holy Waters / Hella War 2, Prints on Venetian blinds, 2024. It features on the front panels a woman immersing in water, while on the back one sees a man consumed by fire.
Front panels of Holy Waters / Hella War 2
The Book of Yona blends the coming-to-America stories of artists Katarzyna Kozera and Yona Verwer’s lives with that of the biblical prophet Jonah / Yona. The art touches on issues of identity, conversion, immigration, and heritage.
Some of the works feature “augmented reality” images, visible on the viewer’s smart phone. See a simulation here.
Click on the images for full view
Hebben Olla Vogala 1, 24 x 36 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2022
Hebben Olla Vogala 2, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2022
The Book of Yona 15, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic paint on canvas
The Book of Yona 6, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic paint on canvas + augmented reality
The Book of Yona 5, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic paint on canvas + augmented reality.
The Book of Yona 8, 24 x 36 inches, Acrylic paint on canvas
The Immersion series explores the Jewish mikvah ritual.
Water-themed sculptural paintings Blessings and Curses are based on ancient texts; in this case they focus on rain. Blessings, curses, and rain are all open to interpretation; while good for one, they may be bad for another. These paintings show the process of opening ourselves: the more we open ourselves to divine energy coming down to us, the more we are open to positive interpretations of events.
Curses
Blessings
Troubled Waters was exhibited in 2019 as a solo exhibition at the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam, as part of the event Art Stations of the Cross.
Troubled Waters, 2019, acrylic paint, augmented reality and sound
The installation is a collaboration between Yona Verwer, a Dutch-born New York artist and composers Alon Nechushtan (excerpts from his “Dark Forces”) and Dan Schwartz (excerpts from “February Strike”); video edits by Masha Norman.
The focus of the work is on Amsterdam’s current and past problems regarding imprisoned women. At the moment many women are still trafficked and forced to work in prostitution; while in the past, during World War I, many Jewish women were deported to concentration camps.
The left large panel shows women in the Holocaust; the panel to its right suggests contemporary young women in captivity.
The flanking panels are maps of the Red Light District, and the former Jewish neighborhood.
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Viewing the augmented reality videos
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Detail
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AR on the iPad
The Times of Israel:
“...Yona Verwer and Katarzyna Kozera’s take on the Book of Jonah, is a pivotal moment for Verwer as a Jew who converted from Catholicism and left her home in the Netherlands for New York.
Her Jonah is in a submarine in New York’s East River, and she takes that up another notch with augmented reality, having viewers use smartphone or tablets to hone in on a spot in the painting, which triggers a video embedded in the artwork, leading the viewer closer to the layered narrative.”
Contact Magazine:
“... Her most recent installation, in collaboration with Polish-born artist Katarzyna Kozera, culminates years of probing the passageways between cultures and continents. A play on her name and the Biblical figure of Jonah, “The Book of Yona” transposes the Biblical whale to a submarine charting the Atlantic and arriving in New York’s East River. The submergence of the submarine also serves as metaphor for immersion in the mikveh as part of the conversion process.
The paintings are interactive, accompanied by images and videos accessible via smartphones to offer additional layers and gleanings that enhance the viewing experience: The artist as a toddler submerged in water and as an adult at a New York shoreline, interspersed with Hebrew passages from The book of Jonah. Taken together, the multimedia series grapples with issues of identity, upheaval, migration, renewal, and personal and collective encounters with Judaism as it charts two women’s paths from old worlds to new”.
Full article here.
About the art series “Book of Yona”
This series blends the immigrant stories of Katarzyna Kozera and myself with the biblical story of Jonah the prophet.
They echo my own journey from Europe to New York, from Catholicism to Judaism. Conversion requires ritual immersion, a total submersion of the body in a pool of water, to symbolize a change-of-soul. The water symbolizes birth as a Jew. In these paintings these “living” waters are New York’s East River.
In some of the works one sees my own eyes above. Ori Z. Soltes wrote: ...”a contemporary underwater fish (a submarine) and the Brooklyn Bridge below; her story embedded beneath the immediately visible surface—and Katarzyna’s parallel journey from Poland to New York”.
The embedded videos, accessible to the viewer by Ipad or smartphone, add another dimension to this narrative.
The biblical story is about second chances, forgiveness, and redemption; humanity matters more than abstractions. Jonah's journey is our journey.
Rabbi Steven Bob, from his book “Jonah and the meaning of our lives”:
“We always want a second chance. We’d like everybody we did us wrong to give us another chance, but are we willing to give others a second chance? Not simply forgiving the people who wronged us, but trusting them again in circumstances in which they had previously disappointed us.....”
“Nineveh raises broader questions: How do we view people different from ourselves?...”
“Do we sometimes look at “others” as threatening? Can we accept that people of other religious communities can be in a proper relationship with the same God we serve, even though they use different images and tell different stories about that God’s connection to humanity?”
More about the biblical book of Yonah here.