Home and Others We Don’t
Mention Out Loud
7x8 feet
Oil on Canvas
2023
The rotating self-portrait merges personal memory with political trauma, reflecting on the personal experience of the artist living in America during the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Through symbolic objects, family archives, and historical references, including Holodomor, Soviet repression, and a massacre in Bucha, the painting explores themes of vulnerability, guilt, disconnection, and the shifting meaning of home in times of displacement caused by war.
Show Me The Winner
2022
6x8 feet
Oil on canvas, thread
A direct confrontation with the consequences of war, this painting centers the lives lost and overlooked in the pursuit of power. Honoring those lost in the ongoing war in Ukraine, the work draws parallels between past and present, including the artist’s own great-grandmother and grandfather who survived WWII. Blending archival imagery with current tragedy, it questions the idea of victory in war.
Price
2022
“36x26”
Oil on canvas
Dressed in embroidered memory, she carries both history and grief. Inspired by a 1956 photograph of a Ukrainian bridesmaid, the figure becomes a vessel, holding the lifeless body of a child killed by Russian forces in 2022. In this painting, beauty is not separate from brutality. It is a reckoning with what it costs to exist as Ukrainian. Price is a tribute to a nation forced to prove its right to endure, over and over again.
Living In War / Video Project
2022
video project
This video blends personal archives, present-day studio footage, and interviews to explore the transformation of life during war. It opens with raw footage of the artist’s mother in the first days of the Russian invasion, then shifts between memories of childhood in Ukraine and life in Michigan. Featuring a conversation with a childhood friend who appears in the archival footage, the piece traces the emotional distance between past joy and present loss while revealing the quiet weight of living in two worlds at once.
Unknown
2022
“42x96”
Oil on canvas, thread
Presented as part of the interactive installation "Rest in Peace"
Mixed media: oil painting, printed photographs, wood, acrylic, tape, fish wire, and mud
Installation size: 8 sq. ft.
“Unknown” became the centerpiece of an immersive installation exploring memory, loss, and the quiet violence of war. Suspended in space, the painting of a male figure floats in isolation—vulnerable, exposed, and disoriented. Surrounding it, scattered photographs from the artist’s archive invite viewers into a personal yet universal mourning. Labeled with the instruction “Step on the pictures,” the floor images confront the audience with a choice: to preserve memory, or erase it.
Titled Rest in Peace, the installation transforms nostalgia into tension while honoring a home now unreachable, and the emotional erosion caused by conflict. Through repetition, fragility, and contradiction, the work blurs the line between viewer and participant, intimacy and detachment, memory and forgetting.
Bloody Nose
2022
“41x30”
Oil on canvas
What began as an ordinary moment, my friend Anya’s nosebleed, unfolded into an intimate meditation on beauty and perception. Painted from a spontaneous photo taken on a film camera in a bathroom of my friend’s apartment, this piece captures the fragile line between discomfort and fascination. Blood, often tied to violence or fear, is reimagined here as something tender and strangely beautiful, a quiet invitation to reconsider what we deem grotesque or sacred.
Boom
2022
11”x6”x6”
Ceramics
Boom is a sculptural reflection on war, loss, and inherited memory. Marked by the violence of explosions and ruptured surfaces, the piece speaks to the destruction of life and home in Ukraine. Etched into its form are echoes of both past and present—connecting the artist to her great-grandfather and to a lineage shaped by conflict. It questions the value of power and the fragility of human life, holding grief and resistance in one fractured body.
I Am Rushing Through
2022
11”x6”x6”
Ceramics
This piece is a sculptural meditation on distance, memory, and emotional survival. Images of the artist’s parents and grandfather emerge beneath the surface, partially obscured by swelling forms, symbols of trauma and rupture. Created during wartime from afar, I Am Rushing Through speaks to the unbearable weight of remembering when home is under attack. It captures the need to keep moving, to suppress grief in order to function while revealing a fractured space between love and helplessness, memory and denial.
Keep Inside
2022
7”x8”x7”
Oil on canvas
This ceramic vessel honors the quiet resilience of Ukrainian mothers during war, those who carry unbearable weight in silence. Inspired by the artist’s sister, the piece portrays scenes of women soothing their children while burying their own fear, guilt, and grief. The fragmented form and etched figures reflect a reality where safety is an illusion, yet life must continue. Keep Inside Your Guilt & Pain speaks to the strength it takes to protect others when you yourself are breaking, to perform normalcy in a world that no longer is.
A Story Of Coming Home
2022
“42x96”
Oil on canvas, thread
A meditation on intimacy and exposure, Unknown presents a lone male figure suspended in stillness. He is half-dressed, unguarded, and contextless. His pose feels disarming, almost intrusive at first, yet slowly invites empathy. What begins as discomfort transforms into recognition: the quiet, familiar ache of being seen. Painted over months of physical strain, this piece became a personal exercise in patience, tenderness, and the slow unraveling of protective layers, both in oil and in self.
A View From Your Arms To A Hug
2022
“4,5x4,5”
Oil on panel
Flirt
2023
“1,5x4”
Mixed media ( ceramics, silk fabric, thread, marker)
Gravity
2023
“48x30,5”
Oil on canvas
Gravity is a portrait suspended in stillness. Gavien stands cloaked in blue, eyes steady and unreadable as if holding a secret just out of reach. The layered background hums with symbols and fragments, but the figure remains anchored, untouchable. There’s a quiet tension in his stance, a gravity that pulls you in without offering answers. He looks not at you, but through you, like a memory you haven’t remembered yet.