Artist Statement
Embracing the free-association of symbolic and conceptual registers constantly in flux amidst globalization, my work embraces cultural memory as syncretic, spiralling, and hyphenated. Grounded in painting, my field expands at times to involve installation, moving image, dance, material cultures & texts - echoing the fragmentary and porous nature of diasporic imagination.
Reckoning with overlapping histories of possession and dispossession, my works remedially respond to the psychological effects of utopian imaginaries and the realities of post-utopian presents. This includes solastalgia: a neologism that describes anxiety related to the accelerated decline of our earth's ecosystems. Seeking a culture-nature synthesis, I work through slower paces, embodied practice and process-led intentions. Extending from lived experience, archival intervention and narrative inquiry research, my works are imbued equally with articulations of the agrarian, ritualistic, ancestral, pre-patriarchal, tacit, vernacular and folkloric. This leads my work to disintegrate chronological interpretations of art history, hierarchies of knowledge and propaganda in its many forms, as I restore animism and recover dignity.
Following off-modernist U-turns and detours, my current approach extends from Ukrainian Futurism also known as the 'Ukrainian Avant-Garde' or 'Executed Renaissance’ with particular interest in the movement's subversive engagement with the motifs and compositions of frescos, icons and textiles. Circling eternally recurring ways that images are used to inform belief, I am interested in the artist as medium.
Ayla Dmyterko is a Ukrainian-Canadian artist currently based in Glasgow, Scotland. She was raised on Treaty 4, territories of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, as well as the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation. She would like to acknowledge the sustained support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative Scotland & The Shevchenko Foundation. Dmyterko's artwork is represented by Alma Pearl, London, UK.
Image: Can't catch lost time or the thinning earth (2022) Oil on linen with poured beeswax frame
Website by erre-ene-erre