Opening reception
Friday, June 5th, 4-7pm
1825 SW Broadway St, Portland, Oregon 97201
Artist Statement
The major themes of my work revolve around the recent history of once-Soviet states: the enormous changes and simultaneous lack of change, social ambivalence, political uncertainty, and the daily experience of common people caught in the midst of momentous changes.
I am after the familiar yet confounding, commonplace yet unsettling, the uncannily mundane, and the ordinary strangeness. My subjects’ confusing and confounding motivations expose the rudderless and rapidly shifting environs of the places torn off from established meaning. I wish to communicate the reluctant repulsion/attraction I feel toward my place of origin, exposing the unjustified sentimentality of nostalgia along with the émigré’s moral difficulty at passing judgments on the land she abandoned.