THE ART SNAPSHOT
“I have moved many times from one country to another, and every time I assimilate into a new culture, I feel parts of me change. I always feel a little bit like a foreigner, never fully belonging. And, my artistic process is an exploration of my overlapping experiences as a woman, immigrant, mother, and an artist”. – Oxana Kovalchuk, Visual Artist
Collages are an essential element of Oxana’s art. She describes her own life itself is like a complicated collage. The ‘layering’ of several different cultures, time periods, and societal models are integral parts of Oxana’s personality. She captures and reflects the reality of different countries and at different times – breaking perceptions into pieces and re-imagining them, re-building them in her own fashion, and transforming them into a new existential paradigm.
Oxana’s mixed-media collages use a combination of sourced and invented imagery to establish new worlds: sometimes free from the rules of perspective, sometimes free from gravity and scale. She uses a variety of materials, many of which come from her personal life, which allows her to imbue every artwork with meaning and emotion. She includes a combination of her own photographs and paintings, and imagery from magazines and other sources. She also incorporates found objects and organic material. She breaks down all the materials into pieces first, deconstructing them before rebuilding these elements into her collages. “Collage for me is not just the disparate parts of an image that I add up to a single picture, but the construction of a new reality from these elements: unrelated pieces at the beginning, yet deeply connected and interacting parts at the end”.
That’s how Oxana describes her two major collage projects – ‘The Illusion of Reality’ and “The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors”.
THE ILLUSION OF REALITY
In this series, I create multimedia, multidimensional glass collages through a layering process, which imitates the layering and distortion of memory.
The transparency of the glass allows me to showcase the process of collage, taking it from a two-dimensional medium to a multidimensional process. Within one collage, my work contains the concrete and abstract: both real and fictional memory. The method of creating collages resembles the process of memory, which is often changed, transformed, or distorted with time, experience, and perception. Although each layer of the collage changes the overall image, the finished piece is consistent: a new, hybrid space with a new meaning. The collage becomes an entire cohesive reality with its own story. When the piece is viewed at different angles, however, the story itself can change through the viewer’s perception.
KINGDOM OF CROOKED MIRRORS
This series is about how much can be achieved in life if there is that desire. New paths, activities, and lifestyles can be chosen even when there are easier roads. Anything is possible, even the creation of new spaces and worlds.
This series of collages allows me to create new spaces that transform the meaning of familiar imagery. I bend the rules of geometry to create distorted perspectives and new realities. In this way, I destroy existing societal structures. My work is like the reflection of a curved mirror: while the subject remains the same, the resulting image is new and distorted.
In my work, I push the boundaries of what is possible, allowing images to be viewed from different perspectives simultaneously. Each change represents a breakthrough, moving beyond existing limitations. With each change, there is a rebirth in my work.
