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The yard becomes something that hints at a presence of people that never seem to occupy it. Out of use, the old grill begins to rust. Remembering long evenings with distant voices coming from near the house while I stay in a patch behind the shed exactly where this grill is hidden, catching fireflies, then letting them fly off of the tip of my finger. How quickly things change, while the setting stays the same, just simply unkept.

 This series was about how coming home has changed over the years. My childhood was spent in the walls and between the fences. I come inside faced with ghostly silence. I spent my entire life in this house and it is so familiar, yet now it is so strangely distant from what it used to be. The view out my window that I’ve seen for years, listening to the same sounds outside that I’ve heard for years. I’ll always feel that this is my sacred space.

Where the body once occupied space there is no one, but myself occasionally, remembering, when I was a child climbing the tree at night and staring at the ground. Scattered circles of empty chairs that accumulated piles of pine needles where we used to sit. Gathered around a half-cut rusted metal barrel filled with rain water, when it was once filled with flames.

But the idea of home has changed the most for my parents. Immigrants from Ukraine came to the US in 1989. Home shifted many times for them, I wonder how that comfort shifts. Now more than ever, their first home is nearly destroyed. The earliest memories of their lives now have no place to look back to. Every landmark, every sidewalk, every school, is no longer. What does home become when yours is destroyed and others you love have to flee their home?

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I’m a photographer and filmmaker living in Chicago. Generally, I work with themes of performance, staged images, theatricality, and surrealism.
I reconsider my surroundings within the framework of what they’ve become to me. I practice self-exploration, and I explore different worlds as I build them. I am particularly inspired by David Lynch and his magical realism. Theatricality has become a key component to my work because of the process. Through acting, reacting, and recreating, the work takes on a dramatic or theatrical quality. This theatricality is not represented in an overly kitsch manner most of the time, though
the theatricality does come from exaggerating the subjects' emotions as if they are performing.

I began by investigating my surroundings in early childhood. As a child I was always so enamored with the tiny little bugs and the color of the sky and the sound of passing cars. In other words, I lived while seeing magic in everyday phenomena. I have since become invested in the human condition. Our suffering, joy, and nostalgia. How I see myself and my experiences, and how I build different worlds as a form of escapism. I am trying to urge people to feel, to explore, to dive into my world, or to create their own. This is often created through formal decisions. The use of color, sound, exaggerated features of surroundings and subjects, and the framing decisions. All of these things combined have the ability to build a world for myself, and the viewer.