The Inner Garden
Darya explores the possibility of self-identification of a person from fragments of cultures and concepts. Her works actualize the thirst for personal integrity in the constantly changing whirlpool of ideas and meanings.
The artist questions the possibility of being a whole person in the era of metamodernism, characterized by oscillation between polar concepts and rethinking of fundamental ideas of the past. Her creativity is an internal response to the question of what wholeness is, and whether there is a need to strive for certain ideals.
Her works also represent an external response to the still existing totalitarian concepts in society. Concepts that are imposed from above, demand a false wholeness, namely a certain ideology, and persecute everything that goes beyond the boundaries of these concepts.
Born at the intersection of Ukrainian and Russian cultures during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dasha manifests fragmentation as the norm, replacing the demands for wholeness with ideas of accepting otherness as unconditional beauty.
Her characters build their own world, in which culture has not turned into a dictatorship – a world that Darya considers her home.
Here is what Darya herself says about her works:
"I paint hybrid beings and symbols of an Anthropomorphic world because I myself feel like a hybrid of cultures and identities. I long for wholeness, and adore seeing it in others, but in myself, I feel fragmented. My paintings are my way of reconciling with my own fragmented identity, and a way to show that beauty does not always have to fit into existing frames."