Artist’s Statement
Through my artwork, I seek to reconcile my relationship with the disparate places I call home: Serbia, from which I left as a young adult, and Canada, where I now reside.
The Eternal Domicile and Halcyon Days collections of paintings forge artistic connections between old and new cultural narratives through storytelling. My visual language explores the intersection of abstract expressionism and contemporary constructivism, characterized by evocative textures and collage-like compositions. The themes combine nostalgia for the naivety of Yugoslav utopia with present concerns of Western Canada, its complicated history, and endangered future.
Despite my cultural ambiguity, I am keenly aware of my positionality in Canada as an immigrant/settler. I empathically and respectfully navigate this land while seeking the language to state that even when one does not belong to any one place, one still belongs in the world. As I interweave the known with the unknown and the imagined, whether Serbian, Canadian, or multicultural, my curiosity about the aesthetics of this visual process continues to grow.
The Eternal Domicile (2022-2024) series of abstract paintings, titled after the iconic poetry verses by the Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović, uses the metaphor of fragmentation to convey the internal conflict stemming from the loss of connection with one's original homeland and rebuilding a life in a new place.
“One of the most challenging things contemporary art can do is produce a new language of emotion, a new way of understanding what we’re feeling now and how it is different from before.”
Greg Borowitz
Halcyon Days (2023) series explores the emotions associated with the broader concept of home. In my early days in Canada, I observed the ocean and the grand shapes of the mountains, which were utterly foreign to my Serbian understanding of a landscape. Looking at this magnificent land through the viewfinder of my old visual references was a fascinating but disorienting experience, like looking at a mirage. I could not quite grasp what I saw, just as I could not grasp how to belong to this place.
“The country we call home, the country we used to call home, and the country we dream to call home are all very distinct and disparate places. It is the result of a productive schizophrenia: we are in all of them at once, a ravishing sensation but one tempered by the slow, sobering devastation of never being in any one entirely.”
Slavs and Tatars Art Collective