I grew up under an oppressive regime. That does something to you. If you are one that feels their breath run short when seeing that there is a limit to what you can say, to what you can express, then being bitten by the visual arts bug is a curse.
I’ve never thought of myself as political, but politics doesn’t care what one thinks.
When a friend approached me with a secret plan to escape the soviet union, my 19-year-old brain couldn’t have known saying yes would result in the loss of my family, my country - my world.
When you lose everything, it opens up room for everything else.
My work is about filling that void. It’s always been about reconnection to a lost world. A world we throw away too quickly only to realize there was gold dust inside that camouflaged itself as mud.
Therefore, my axioms are simple.
Gold is timeless
Ancient culture is our teacher
Scale shows us where we stand