My images refer to my personal history and culture, something that I embrace and honor. My desire to explore the concept of fitting together two cultures led me to stage these genre painting-like scenes, using Ukrainian or Russian immigrant models, and making my own costumes, based on traditional Ukrainian fashions of the pasts. I want my work to express my personal love and appreciation for Ukrainian culture, while acknowledging the conflicts I experience also wanting to be a contemporary American woman (complete with a washing machine, Cosmos, cell phone and shopping). I realize that it is not possible for me to completely resolve my conflict between the past and present, Ukraine and America. Leaving one's country for good and assimilating into a different culture is a heart-breaking process of give and take, in which some traditions get left behind and replaced by new ones. My goal is a lighthearted and sometimes humorous expression of my immigrant sense of being, as I and many other Ukrainian immigrants struggle to fit together some aspects of the lives we left behind with the ones we live today.

Fitting Ukraine ~ 2006