Life of a Poet: Sacred Objects
This ongoing series chronicles everyday objects that belonged to my late uncle, a poet in the USSR who called Kiev home. In painting these recreated things, I explore how ordinary objects can take on a sacredness, becoming icons of their owner.
Like many, Oleg did not thrive under the USSR’s oppressive regime (and the cataclism of changes that followed.) With his father remaining in Kyiv and his mother moving to St. Petersburg, Russia after a divorce, Oleg chose to remain in Kyiv — the city he’d call home his whole life. Along with publishing multiple books of poetry, recording music and writing relentlessly, Oleg spent his life battling addiction and victimhood.
Life of a Poet gives Oleg another chance to be seen. A series of small-scale paintings on paper from photographs will span his childhood in the USSR through adolescence and adulthood in a changing world. Their intimate scale invites the viewer to step close, encountering him personally rather than one of many. Through telling Oleg’s story, I seek to restore complexity to a life flattened by a single narrative, finding a language that holds contradiction without erasing tenderness and honors connection without denying harm.