Artist Statement

Growing up in communist country was not such a bad thing, everything seemed ideal to me as a child. I had a stable family, everyone had a stable income and education was offered to anyone regardless of their income or socioeconomic status. I did not realize that I had no choice over my future until I was able to leave my home and move to the United States where I realized that it really is the freedom of choice over the outcome of our lives that makes this life exciting.

Choices and outcomes and the tensions between them are the themes of art that I find most exciting to work with. It is not as much the that medium I use as it is what I express. My medium of choice is determined by the message I am trying to send.  Early on, when I had just moved to United States I used predominantly photography as the medium of a choice. It seemed to me that everyone responds and is able to communicate by means of pictures.  In the process of schooling myself in the visual language of the culture my vocabulary diversified into other media such as sculpture, video and installation.

After achieving some success visually communicating with my audience I was also interested in the process of becoming, and learning the roots of this visual language. It seemed to me that the visual arts are one of the most natural ways of communicating, however many people are either afraid of it or have forgotten how to speak or listen, to use the linguistic metaphor. And so I also became curious in the ways to teach not just other artist but also children and adults the way we learn, transmit and consume visual culture.

In my work I like to explore the meeting points of various media, technologies, concepts and ideologies. I am interested in the spaces that exist where several opposing concepts meet. Such as a crossroads of three or more paths, crossing each other’s way and converging in one or multiple points. The space created by those convergences is what interests me. Places full of tension and ambiguity where anything is possible and any decision may yield unpredictable and unique results and yet all emerging from seemingly directed paths. More concretely this ambiguity exists for me in the mixing of traditional, non-traditional and new technologies; images, objects and spaces; or art making, art teaching and art appreciation.

Being on a direct path is satisfying, it gives us foresight and a direction to follow. Crossroads, however, are exciting to me with the multiple choices their offer and I look forward to exploring their possibilities in my future work.