TIDES | ETHERNAL DOMICILE | HALCYON DAYS
By developing a visual language of observation and recollection, past and present, serenity and disorientation, Tatjana seeks to reconcile her relation to the disparate places she calls home: war-torn Serbia, which she left as a young adult, and Canada, where she lives now. Her goal is to further refine this exploration of homeland and belonging.
Reinterpreting the landscape genre for a contemporary audience using traditional painting techniques and collage, Tatjana's work grapples with oppositions: objective and subjective; environment and memory; material surface and illusionistic depth. Shaping space out of place, she creates complex spatial fields that hover between worlds and dramatize overlapping temporalities.
Her visual vocabulary is influenced by the geometric abstract-expressionism for its use of fragmentation and combination of close-ups, cross-sections, and aerial views to communicate the subjective feeling of a place. Guiding her practice also are theories of displacement, the concept of hybridity, as well as the work of Eastern European neo-avant-garde artists exploring country and home, their convergence and divergence.
The compositions are multi-directional, developed in carefully planned layers. Rather than approaching the challenge with collage (as she has in the past, literally cutting up and reassembling traditional landscape canvases she had painted), Tatjana contemplated a more deliberate strategy, where form (shape, colour, texture) and concept align more efficiently. For example, expressive, organic, heavy-bodied brushstrokes communicate the visceral experiences of the rugged British Columbia coast—connecting, colliding, and overlapping with flat, thinly-painted surfaces commemorating quieter memories, ruminations on the sorrow for the past as well as the future predations of this land and its first peoples. The bright, non-local colours relate to non-material temporal sensations like dread, awe, grief, and hope.
While this work communicates the essence of her Canadian experience with its natural and human elements, cross-cultural Serbian references are also present. The goal of reconciling herself to having two homelands is evident in the motifs of the dystopic grittiness of late twentieth-century Serbia as well as in the rich colours and textures reminiscent of its cultural heritage.