Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki

Artist Statement

In my early days in Canada, I observed the ocean and the grand shapes of mountains, 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. Even then, I sensed that what I saw was not all there was; there were complex issues and histories hidden behind the views.

To leave one's home means severing connections with people and culture, taking a few possessions and putting them together in the new place, and supplementing the missing pieces with what can be found there. This process is anxious and imperfect, to say the least. Some of the losses cannot be replaced. The newly discovered parts of life don't always fit with the old ones, and the solutions are often temporary, falling apart and having to be redone. This state of incompleteness becomes the only permanency. No matter how hard one tries to settle down and imitate an undisturbed life, the fault lines are a reminder of the lost home and a motivation to keep building the new one. There is a sense of familial dynamics between all these fragments, somewhat conflicting and haphazardly put together but managing to collaborate.

In the formal sense, my work is interested in the conceptually conflicting theories of constructivism and abstract expressionism. Combining them within one artwork conveys how I deal with dichotomy by processing instinctive emotions while carefully considering the structures where those dichotomous emotions exist. These models apply to single-culture and multicultural creation; however, making art in a heterogeneous culture is less likely to be bound by a singular methodology. The resulting abstract paintings undoubtedly belong to and enrich the intersection of the two cultures.