Yevgeniya Baras, Untitled, Oil and mixed media on canvas, 24 x 30 in, 2025.

Artist Talk: Yevgeniya Baras & Thomas Elick

Join us for an evening with Parts & Labor residents Yevgeniya Baras and Thomas Elick. Though they will share the evening in conversation, each artist will present their work individually, offering insight into the questions, processes, and ideas that shape their practices.

Yevgeniya Baras's paintings take shape through a process of layering and accumulation, combining oil media with various found and unconventional materials. The resulting objects hover between painting and sculptural relief, with layers that frequently extend onto the sides and supports of the canvas, refusing any definitive boundary. Within these stratified compositions, Baras creates symbolic topographies which address ideas of language, migration, and translation. The material richness of the work serves to generate abstractions that are encoded and deeply personal.

Thomas Elick creates intricate works on paper that draw from the visual language of maps, diagrams, weather systems, and imagined landscapes. Elick’s work as a paper conservator has connected him to the beauty of the folds, tears, stains and various mishaps addressed in his studio.Through layered processes of drawing, collage, folding, tearing, and repair, his works examine transformation, superstition, and the ways we navigate both physical and psychological terrain.

The evening will conclude with a conversation and audience Q&A exploring the intersections and divergences of their practices, as well as the experience of sustaining independent artistic lives alongside one another as partners and parents.