Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy talk with painter Yevgeniya Baras at her exhibition Of Things Soothsaid and Spoken at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through March 29, 2015.

Baras discusses the works on view, described in the catalog as "small-scale, textured oil paintings reconfigure abstraction as a kind of talismanic skin. Baras incorporates a variety of materials into her paintings: wood, yarn, paper-maché and foil. Her distressed and encrusted surfaces collected gestures, cuts and marks recall the traces of age, devotion and obsession found in ritual objects and textiles of tribal cultures."