Embracing the free-association of symbolic and conceptual registers constantly in flux amidst globalization, I channel what is syncretic, spiralling, and hyphenated. Grounded in lineages of painting, my field expands at times to involve total installation, moving image, material cultures & texts - echoing the noumenal nature of cultural memory. Extending from archival intervention and narrative inquiry research, my works are imbued equally with articulations of the ritualistic, pre-patriarchal, tacit, vernacular and folkloric. This leads my work to disintegrate canonical interpretations of art history and hierarchies of knowledge to recover dignity. Circling eternally recurring ways that images are used to inform belief, I am interested in the artist as medium.
I am a Ukrainian-Canadian artist based in Glasgow, Scotland, raised in Saskatchewan, Canada on Treaty 4, territories of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, as well as the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation. The parallel psycho-geographic consequences of colonial projects upon my home landscape and those of my ancestors deeply informs my artistic research and creation. In remedial response, my artworks reckon with the possession & dispossession of lands, objects, psyches & skies; derived from both lived & collective experience.
Informed by notions of spirituality and social responsibility, returning themes include: solastalgic synchronicities; psycho-sublimation via stereotypes; repeating patterns evident in textiles, nature and fourth-dimensional thinking; feminist cosmism’s immanence as animist ethos; old-country aphorisms as reminders of human-nature entanglements; as well as the origins of folkloric dance as inherently connected environment and congregation. Following off-modernist U-turns and detours, my current approach extends from inquiry into the Ukrainian-Avant Garde, or 'Executed Renaissance'. Interested in colour as affect and process over perfection in response to current technological threats to artistic integrity, my works draw upon ecclesiastical motifs, compositional strategies and modes of artistic concealment inherent to votive images as devices of both rupture and rapture.
I would like to acknowledge the sustained support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative Scotland & The Shevchenko Foundation. My artwork is represented by Alma Pearl, London, UK.
This analogue portrait was taken in my studio at David Dale Gallery by artist Jess Holdengarde using natural darkroom processes.
Website by erre-ene-erre