Art, for me, functions as a form of self-help and therapy, a transformational process where the subconscious imagination, emotional awareness, and cultural examination can coexist. I aim to create work that is deeply personal, a declaration of survival, desire, and autonomy.  Over the years, my work has explored how memory, identity, and myth intersect within broader systems of power, culture, and belonging. I am drawn to themes of spirituality, mental health, queer identity, decolonization, and our fractured relationship with nature. My practice is process-based and non-medium specific. While rooted in my training as a fine painter, it spans drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and video, often combining traditional materials with experimental forms to create immersive and emotionally charged visual experiences. The works invite reflection on what it means to be human today.

I was born and raised in Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia), in a time of social upheaval and transformation. When I was a child, Yugoslavia was still a secular, multiethnic country, but as the conflict of the 1990s unfolded, religion and nationalism re-emerged as dominant forces. I witnessed firsthand how belief systems, religious, political, national, and cultural, can shape collective behavior, justify violence, and rewrite memory. Because of this, I have long been interested in examining the idea of personal stories, alternative histories, and imagined realities. My work often addresses the inheritance of collective trauma; how unresolved histories linger in bodies, landscapes, and symbols; and how art can become a space for healing and transformation.

A central thread in my work is the idea of reconstruction, rebuilding meaning from fragments of memory, history, and myth. My memories often feel like a bone yard of broken signifiers, images that have shed their original meanings but still carry emotional weight. As an artist, I see myself as a kind of modern alchemist, fishing these fragments out of the subconscious and recombining them into new visual narratives. This process allows me to reclaim stories that have been erased or overlooked, especially those tied to queer identity and marginalized histories. At the same time, I strive to leave room for interpretation; I don’t want to dictate meaning but rather to invite viewers to project their own experiences and imagination into the work.

I often use the visual motif of surreal plant life, with a particular emphasis on wild weeds. They can serve not only as a symbol of nature’s ingenuity, but a metaphor for human resilience and endurance, LGBTQ identity, the immigrant experience, and colonization. My recent exhibitions, Bird Circuit (Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, 2025) and Playground at the Abandoned Chapel (Walter Maciel Gallery, 2023), reflect some of my ongoing explorations. By using surrealist imagery and bright, layered and textured compositions, I sought to joyously transform a painful past and hidden LGBTQ communities while connecting them to contemporary questions of visibility, vulnerability, and self-invention. Playground at the Abandoned Chapel emerged from my time as an Artists At Work resident at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California. While exploring the Antelope Valley, I discovered an abandoned school filled with debris and forgotten toys. That space became the setting for a new body of work, paintings and a collaborative video piece exploring playfulness, loss, and the poetry of decay. Both projects transformed ordinary or forgotten places into sites of reflection and renewal, where personal and collective histories could coexist.

I believe that lived experience, in all its contradictions, can be a source of profound beauty and radical possibility. My goal is not to provide answers but to open questions about how we see ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we can reimagine the world through empathy and imagination. In that sense, my work is both deeply personal and communal. It speaks from my own experience but reaches toward something larger: a shared desire to find meaning, healing, and dignity within the chaos of contemporary life.