Yevgeniya Kaganovich, Pearl Necklace XII, 2019, silicone rubber, graduated pearls, silk thread, 14-karat white gold clasp, gift of the artist, 2019.001

In contemporary jewelry-making value can lie entirely in artistry rather than the precious materials used. This approach leaves artists free to use modern, inexpensive substances like plastic, silicone, glass, and other “alternative” materials to create works that use color and light to dazzle us rather than gold and diamonds.

In her 2005–2009 "Pearl Necklace" series Yevgeniya Kaganovich, a Belarus-born artist who is currently a professor of jewelry and metalsmithing at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, explores the cultural and social functions of adornment, and how jewelry communicates ideas about the wearer, projects a desired image, attracts, and seduces. This piece, composed of a pearl necklace embedded in a more abstract, perfected string of circular pearl-like silicone discs, presents a juxtaposition of precious and experimental materials that questions the cultural value of precious jewelry. The "Pearl Necklace" series explores the sometimes contradictory symbolism of pearls: prestige, status, wealth, power, glamour, celebrity, purity, innocence, corruption, and seduction. How strange that what begins as a mere irritation inside of a mollusk, and transformed into what is essentially a scar, has become such a precious and glorified artifact of imperfection.