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Photographer Vesna Pavlović’s first Oregon exhibit opens Saturday at RecRoom, with a free University of Oregon talk Wednesday. An inspired menu by the Eastern European bistro Domek in Eugene will feature Balkan dishes the first month of the exhibit.
Serbian American photographer and artist Vesna Pavlović captures the former Yugoslavia’s old halls and fading hotels in a way that makes them much more than just pieces of architecture.
Pavlović was born in Serbia when it was a part of Yugoslavia. Her work showcases shared history between several countries that joined the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization that emerged during the Cold War for states wanting to remain independent from the major power blocs of the time, the United States and the Soviet Union.
You can take a look at these spaces, which depict intricate light fixtures in former Yugoslav federal buildings and rundown concrete beams outside modernist hotels, in the exhibit “A Room With a View.” It will soon be showing at the RecRoom, a Eugene-based art gallery.
Pavlović is now the Paul E. Schwab chair in fine arts and professor of art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. But when she started her career in the early 2000s, Sarah Finlay, owner of RecRoom gallery, said she quickly became a fan.
At the time, Finlay owned a contemporary art gallery in Washington, D.C., called Fusebox and was enamored by Pavlović’s work.
“She brought in these images of the hotels (from former Yugoslavia), and we were just blown away by them,” Finlay said.
More than 20 years later, Finlay is now based in Eugene, with an art gallery in the lower level of her house. She’s helping bring Pavlović’s work to Oregon for the first time.
The exhibit showcases two decades of work by Pavlović and an accompanying essay written by Nicoletta Rousseva, visiting assistant professor of Slavic and East European languages and cultures at Indiana University.
The exhibit’s title is a reference to James Ivory’s 1985 film “A Room With a View,” Pavlović said. She has a bachelor’s degree in cinematography and said she carries film references with her.
The exhibit opens Saturday, Oct. 17. But a free talk happens at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14, in Room 115 of Lawrence Hall on the University of Oregon campus. The lecture, moderated by UO associate professor of history Julie Hessler, will feature Pavlović and Rousseva talking about Pavlović’s work.
Also, at Eugene’s Eastern European bistro, Domek, patrons can enjoy a special dinner in collaboration with RecRoom. The menu features Balkan dishes and will run during the first month of the exhibit.
Much more than a sunset
To reach the exhibit, you’ll pass a vintage projector in the garage, displaying archival photos taken by various official state photographers, sourced from the Museum of Yugoslavia, Fotoeka archive.
An image by Pavlović, “No Ordinary Sunset,” greets you upon entering the house. The photograph, which she took on a shoreline along the Atlantic Ocean, connects three countries in the Non-Aligned Movement: Yugoslavia, where she was born, Angola, where she stood taking the picture, and Cuba, where her camera faced.
Pavlović was in Angola on a research project with a group of architectural historians. They were trying to trace a former Yugoslav system called “IMS Žeželj,” developed in the 1960s and then exported as a form of solidarity to Cuba and Angola.
“We can read that it’s a sunset over murky water, and it has these beautiful tones, but we have no context,” Pavlović said. “It’s kind of like looking into ourselves and our personal experiences to understand what photographs are about because they’re metaphors and they’re always about something else.”
Pavlović said that sunset carries more than its colors.
“It’s a sunset that projects hope, projects solidarity, projects history from one country to another,” she said.
Many of the other photographs were taken inside Belgrade’s Sava Center and the Palace of the Federation, also known as the Federal Executive Council building, along with hotels once built to serve Yugoslavia’s sprawling bureaucracy.
Rousseva, whose essay is titled “Vesna’s Views” and accompanies the show, said the photographs hold two truths at once. Her essay describes the work as depicting institutions and structures as “aspirational yet imperfect, monumental yet fragile.”
“For me, her photographs really kind of invite you inside of these spaces, and they do so in a way that doesn’t reduce politics to one or the other,” Rousseva said. “That allows for both the intensity, severity and harsh complexity of that history.”
That balance, Rousseva said, is what makes this show timely.
“I think that this is just one of those wonderful moments where art lines up with our world, and again invites us to think not about politics in a kind of binary or sort of dualistic way of good or bad,” Rousseva said, “but rather what potential might these flawed institutions still hold?”
A bistro with a view
RecRoom isn’t the only place where you can enjoy Pavlović’s work: Two of her pieces are permanently installed at Domek, the restaurant.
A few months before opening the bistro, Domek co-owner and maitre-d’ Sarah Oliver-Johnson stared at the dining room’s pale walls. There were two blank spaces.
Domek is a love letter to chef Andrew Hroza’s Polish roots and his Chicago childhood, as well as a culmination of Hroza’s and Oliver-Johnson’s joint culinary career.
Domek was also the first restaurant the couple opened independently.
For the menu, they paired Hroza’s roots with the Willamette Valley’s year-round bounty, dreaming up pork belly pierogies, Polish potato dumplings studded with oyster mushrooms and chanterelles, wild-caught coho salmon and charred sungolds.
Now for those walls.
Oliver-Johnson called Finlay, her friend and RecRoom director, to help steer the space’s artistic direction.
“I knew we needed color,” Oliver-Johnson said. That, and something that evoked Eastern Europe, a region at once beautiful and politically and ideologically complex.
She and Hroza had designed Domek, which means “little house” in Polish, to strike a balance between cozy and energizing. They wanted a place where you can feel at home while setting the stage for an excellent dining experience.
They saw something similar in Pavlović’s photographs, “The Salon of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia” and “The Salon of the Socialist Republic of Serbia.”
“When I look at both of these pictures, they’re beautiful and striking,” Oliver-Johnson said. “But their primary goal isn’t really to be cozy. They’re more concerned with being rooms where exciting things happen.”
She was sold. But one doesn’t simply acquire a piece from an artist whose work has appeared in major private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It requires time, investment and relationships with gallery directors such as Finlay.
“I think that speaks to the importance of the gallerist,” Oliver-Johnson said, calling Finlay an “in-between person” who connects artists to prospective buyers. “They help the patrons understand their work and acquire it.”
With Finlay’s guidance and the artist’s eventual blessing, the couple each chose a piece from Pavlović they adored.
Displaying gallery-quality pieces in a restaurant is “a little unorthodox,” Oliver-Johnson said. But it also makes them more accessible, a chance for her to guide diners through the piece just as she would describe the dishes on Domek’s menu.
“I talk incessantly to people about it,” she said of Pavlović’s art. “It’s part of the beauty of having these pieces.”
Later, Oliver-Johnson reflected on what it meant to display Pavlović’s work during her exhibit at RecRoom.
“I think, in part, ‘A Room with a View’ is asking us to consider the importance of beauty and pleasure. That those rooms aren’t just stunning to look at, they’re the environments that inspired potential and spurred the ideologies of Yugoslavia,” she wrote to Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “We hope that Domek, in some small way, is similar.”
Such beauty and enjoyment in dining experiences, from cocktails to pierogis, she said, “stimulates vital parts in all of us.”
It was more than a year after the couple, who now call themselves certified “Vesna fangirls,” opened Domek, when it was announced Pavlović would bring her “A Room With a View” exhibition to RecRoom. The couple knew they wanted to collaborate in some way.
The way, of course, was food.
Domek will feature a special menu, inspired by “A Room With a View,” during the first month of the exhibition.
In developing the menu, which celebrates Balkan dishes, Hroza and Oliver-Johnson looked once more at Pavlović’s pieces, asking, “What are the kinds of foods that would be served in these rooms?”
Their answer: a ćevapi dinner of grilled and seasoned ground beef sausages and an accoutrement of ajvar (a snappy eggplant red pepper relish), kajmak (a luscious Serbian clotted cream), charred peppers,onions and flatbread. A standout starter: a spicy cheese spread known as urnebes in Serbia, served on Noisette’s rye bread.
Oliver-Johnson said she views the dishes as supporting characters to the exhibition’s message.
“Food often makes for an easy doorway into other cultures, prompts us to consider them, even reflect on their histories,” she wrote to Lookout.
A gallery in a home
“Galleries can be intimidating,” Finlay said. “A lot of times you go in and all the information is at the front counter, and you’re just kind of standing there, and you feel awkward. But here, we invite people to sit down. That’s why I wanted to have a salon-style atmosphere where people could spend time with the art.”
Every show she hosts in her home comes with an essay and a binder of the artist’s press and résumé. She said her goal is to build new collectors.
Eugene, Finlay said, doesn’t have a deep collector base, so she offers payment plans and doesn’t charge for visits or art advice.
“I always think of myself as creating new patrons of the arts,” Finlay said.
If you go
Exhibit
- What: “A Room With a View”
- When: Saturday, Oct. 17 from 4 to 6 p.m. is the opening reception. The exhibit will be up through Dec. 5, Fridays from noon to 6 p.m., Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m and by appointment Tuesdays through Thursdays from noon to 4 p.m.
- Where: RecRoom, 4415 Hilyard St., Eugene.
- How much: Free
Artist’s talk
- What: Pavlović and Rousseva in conversation, moderated by Julie Hessler
- When: 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14
- Where: Lawrence Hall 115, University of Oregon
- How much: Free
Dinner
- What: Balkan-inspired cuisine in collaboration with “A Room With a View”
- When: Served during restaurant hours (5 to 9:30 p.m., Wednesday to Saturday), through the first month of the exhibition
- Where: Domek, 454 Willamette St., Eugene
Correction: This story originally stated that the photos displayed by the vintage projector were taken by the former president of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito. They were not. They are archive photos.
