What compels me to paint is the search of an interplay between illusion and reality. As our present experience fades into the past, the intangible residue of memory is all that remains. Memories of things disappeared build the emotional facets of our inner history. Memory is veiled from us by the acts of unconscious. Yet sometimes we choose to deliberately conceal our experiences and even the memory of them. Thus the intrigue lies in the fracture between the unconscious veiling and the present effort to recollect or to forget. We blind our present from the past by forgetting or concealing. These shards of memory are all that remain. In my work, I wish to remember and recreate my own fragments, reinterpreting them as I am inclined and informed by my emotions.
My painting speaks metaphorically of the personal, psychological reconstruction of a home or a past. I deal with fragments from the culture that I left behind in Russia and my introspection on womanhood. The dress is an illusion and a disillusion. The gates and the wedding cakes are both tangible barriers and invitations to indulge. We have no physical grasp on time. We pass freely though the realms of experience; shards of memory drift back to us, palpable and immediate. We sometimes forget that these matters past and present and perhaps veiled to us forever.
