I was born in Odessa, Ukraine, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In my childhood, I witnessed my family continuously dissect their cognitive dissonance in relation to what they saw and heard on the news. Naturally, I became fascinated with the ways public imagination is forged out of hearsay and propaganda. As an artist, my conceptual framework formed around subverting and spectacularizing the environments where my subjects appear. With elements in both figuration and abstraction, my paintings shift between the real and the imagined. Through this visual language I aim to pose certain questions: How can we know what is happening in the world? Can we ever trust stories and rumors of what has happened knowing that all reports are mediated, if not due to malicious intent than simply because no account can escape subjectivity? Once we receive said reports, can we trust our own critical faculties to parse the information to understand the events? Perhaps most importantly, are we already too preconditioned to believe certain truths as reality?