“HEY THERE, HOT SUGAR,” reads the doors to the Edith Renfrow Smith `37 Gallery on the first floor of the Joe Rosenfield `25 Center. On the other side of the glass door, on walls painted pink and periwinkle, hangs the work of Alina Ihnatesku `26.
Ihnatesku officially opened the gallery to guests on Oct. 8, promptly at 8 p.m. Soon the room was lively with music and conversation as visitors mused over Ihnatesku’s work, a collection of phrases made of laser cut plywood nailed or screwed to the wall.
The idea for the gallery came about on a road trip Ihnatesku took with her friends over the summer. The whole road trip, Ihnatesku said, she felt lost. Between entering her last year of college, navigating relationships and friendships, graduate school applications and H-1B visa complications, there was a strong sense of unknown.
“The first couple of weeks of the semester were really rough, figuring out what I’m gonna do post-grad. And at the same time, I realized that this is a decision I made for myself to come here to the States,” Ihnatesku said.
“All these hard things that you face when you’re in your early early 20s, there’s no solution to them,” Ihnatesku said. “But I guess the thing I can do with my silly art is to offer a form of connection.”
As a typography nerd, Ihnatesku incorporates words and fonts into all of her art projects. When she started the project at the beginning of September, Ihnatesku bought a pack of wall lettering decals to incorporate into the gallery display. Ihnatesku ended up using 13 different fonts for the phrases of different sizes in the gallery.
Between all of the phrases on display and the few that were ultimately left out of the show, Ihnatesku said she used 50 sheets worth of plywood and was still cutting out words up until a week before the show. With the help of friends, installing the gallery took three full days of work, from painting the walls, to taping out where the words would go and then installing the work to the walls.
An attendee at the opening asked why she attached her pieces with screws. Ihnatesku responded, “It shows the manual labor that goes into all of this. And with my art practice, there is a lot of manual labor.”
Ihnatesku said she picked the color scheme to add some fun into the space, especially to contrast phrases like “OH BOY, OH PAIN,” “I USED TO BE FUN,” or “I’M NOT THE PERFECT DAUGHTER.”
“It’s kind of a little dark, but at the same time, the colors show that it’s still okay.” Ihnatesku said.
Ihnatesku moved to the United States from her home country of Ukraine when she was 17. English is her third language, but Ihnatesku said she chose to write all the phrases on the Smith Gallery walls in English regardless of her not feeling articulate enough in the language. She said that because she left at 17 she never got the opportunity to grow her adult sense of self in Ukraine. Instead she learned how to be an adult in Grinnell, in English.
“In English, I can be as vulnerable as I can be,” Ihnatesku said. “You can describe so many things. English is my third language and there’s a lot of things that come with that. At some point you start having to talk this much in English and then having to call your parents and not being able to translate in your own language.”
“That’s something that is always with me in my head, this appreciation for words and the language and something that even if you’re not articulate enough, you’re not stupid,” Ihnatesku said.
Of all of the phrases installed in the gallery, only one phrase is in lower case. It reads “hey, I think of you daily.”
“To the friends who left and the friends who I have in Ukraine or in Germany or those friends I made here in Grinnell who have already graduated, I think of them daily,” Ihnatesku said. “Being Grinnell made me really appreciate the community you build around friends and people.”
When asked what her favorite phrase was, Ihnatesku pointed to the one taking an entire wall. It reads “I FUCKED MYSELF INTO THIS, I’LL FUCK MYSELF OUT.”
“At this point in life, with the new administration and everything that’s going on, it’s hard to think of the future because there’s so much uncertainty,” Ihnatesku said. “I found peace with that, like, things change at a moment’s notice and there’s no point in just crying about it. I’ll figure it out.”
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of Ihnatesku’s show to “HEY THERE, HOT SUGAR.”
