I am a Ukrainian-Canadian artist based in Glasgow, Scotland, raised in Saskatchewan, Canada on Treaty 4, territories of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, as well as the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation. The parallel psycho-geographic consequences of colonial projects upon my home landscape and those of my ancestors drives my work.
In remedial response, I reckon with the possession & dispossession of lands, objects, psyches & skies; derived from both lived & collective experience. Grounded in lineages of painting, my field expands at times to involve total installation, moving image, performance, material cultures & texts - echoing the noumenal nature of cultural memory. Extending from archival intervention and narrative inquiry research, my works are imbued equally with articulations of the ritualistic, pre-patriarchal, tacit, vernacular and folkloric. This leads my work to disintegrate canonical interpretations of art history and hierarchies of knowledge to recover dignity. Circling eternally recurring ways that images are used to inform belief, I am interested in the artist as medium.
Embracing the free-association of symbolic and conceptual registers constantly in flux amidst globalization, my work is syncretic, spiralling, and hyphenated. Informed by notions of spirituality and social responsibility, returning themes include: solastalgic synchronicities, psycho-sublimation via stereotypes, expectations of artistic labour inherent to gender and social class, modernism’s patterns derived from textiles repeated in nature evident in fourth dimensional thinking, feminist cosmist immanence as animist ethos, old-country aphorisms as reminders of human-nature entanglements, and the origins of dance inherently connected to land, congregation and ritual. Following off-modernist U-turns and detours, my current trajectory extends from the Ukrainian-Avant Garde, or 'Executed Renaissance', with particular interest in art as healing in times of upheaval, colour as affect and process over perfection in response to current technological threats to artistic integrity.
Ayla 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.
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