Art is alchemy—a process where the mixing of unusual ingredients produces new meanings and enables time travel, merging spaces, landscapes, ideas, and lifetimes.
The Living is both an installation and a trance, weaving together the living room of my childhood in Poland with its lore playing on monitors reminiscent of past aesthetics and its mountain-view wallpaper. This childhood space merges with the landscape of the Shawangunks, the home my six-year-old son now calls his own. The work reimagines mythologies, blending old Slavic fairy tales with the lore of the land—original Lenapehoking and Kuwehoki, the land of the pine trees—where the pyre evokes the warmth and memory of the home’s hearth.
Within The Living, my world emerges from a tapestry of cultural influences, just as material culture reflects the global economy. The BaSla videos (Baltic and Slavic animal movement) and the wallpaper image of the Seven Sisters constellation were created in alignment with the energies of Full Moons, fusing the elemental powers of the universe with the collaborative process of art-making. The Slavic tropes of flowery fabrics tell their own layered story of economic dependency and conquest, produced in the Global South, sold in the West, and reclaimed from landfills in my hometown of Ełk, in Poland’s Masurian Lake District.
We are not all equal. Those of us from the edges of the Western empire can claim the power of a symbolic gesture —through art.
