Ayla Dmyterko's artworks reckon with the possession & dispossession of lands, objects, psyches & skies; derived from both lived & collective experience. Her practice–grounded in lineages of painting–expands at times to involve film, performance, total installation, material cultures & texts - echoing the noumenal nature of cultural memory. Drawing synchronicity to initiate solidarity across time, poetics of porosity and dissonance expose the psychological effects of utopian imaginaries and the reality of post-utopian presents. In remedial response, she embraces a culture-nature synthesis. To be communed with ecology is to accept and trust in chaos, a continual re-ordering is what is needed to keep us all alive. Following off-modernist U-turns and detours, her works draw upon languages of the natural world, psychedelia, animist ritual, the Ukrainian avant-garde, spiritual abstraction and the aura of archival objects. Circling eternally recurring ways that images are used to inform desire and dreams, she is interested in the artist as medium.
Dmyterko is a Ukrainian-Canadian artist born in Saskatchewan, the lands of nēhiyawak, Saulteaux, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. She is based in the UK and working internationally.
Recent solo exhibitions include Ring Around the Sun & We Rage On, Alma Pearl, London, UK (2025); Liberate Thee, Angel of History, Pangée, Montréal, CA (2023); Vyshyvani Kazky, Embroidered Stories, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, CA (2022); and The Story Began With a Beet (It Must End With The Devil), Pangée, Montréal, CA (2015). Selected group exhibitions have been presented at Pangée, Montréal, CA (2025); Alma Pearl, London, UK (2025 & 2024); Hypha Studios, London, UK (2024); KIRKI Projects, Sifnos Island, GR (2024); and VITRINE, Basel, CH (2023). Her film On Volya: Filling in The Frescoes was screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK as part of the London Short Film Festival 2024 and David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, UK in collaboration with the Dovzhenko Centre, Kyiv, UA (2023).
Ayla would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative Scotland & the Shevchenko Foundation.
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