I work across installation, sculpture, video, painting, drawing, printmaking and performance to examine themes of migration, displacement, identity, gender and body. As an immigrant from Ukraine, my practice is informed by my own lived experience, engaging with failure, loss of communication, and longing, while reclaiming the body and agency through play, humor, and experimentation.
Weaving the personal and political, I create worlds and personas that confront stereotypes, prejudices, and systems of oppression, often emphasizing the absurd in the everyday. My work reflects my own journey while resonating with the shared histories and collective memories of displaced communities. The acts of leaving home, navigating new cultural landscapes, learning a new language, and reconstructing identity form the foundation of my investigations.
Occupying the terrain of the critical capitalist grotesque and a 21st-century anarchic Dadaist, Garage-Band feminist-punk sensibility, my process is driven by extensive research and collecting. Each project begins with a careful selection of materials for their symbolic potential, such as fabric, found and discarded objects, family and historical archives, abandoned furniture, left over paint, domestic remnants and printmedia, emphasizing tactility and physical presence in relation to the senses, memory, and consumerist desire and detritus.
My vision bridges personal and generational narratives, fostering empathy and dialogue while highlighting the fluidity of identity and the resilience of humanity in the face of change. I examine the formation and deconstruction of communal pain, centering silenced or excluded voices during times of conflict. Through my work, I seek to counter historical amnesia, illuminate pressing issues, and interrogate power dynamics and notions of freedom, working as an immigrant, woman, and artist-citizen.