Tatiana Kuzyk
100Prints is proud to introduce Photographer and Multi-Media Artist, Tatiana Kuzyk.
Tatiana was born in Poland in a heavily industrialised region that had been ravaged by environmental damage and pollution – it was a place where beauty was shrouded in raw, brittle layers of imperfection. During her adolescence, she witnessed post-communist upheaval and rapid changes in popular culture as the East was beginning to embrace the West.
In her early adulthood she moved to the United States where she became drawn into the fine arts and began to pursue her education in the liberal arts with a focus on painting and design. After graduating with high honours from the College
of Du Page in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, she began to experiment with mixed media paintings and collages. Slowly, Tatiana built up a sizeable body of work that she began presenting in solo and group exhibitions within the Chicago metropolitan area.
During the years that followed, she became fascinated with depth psychology and in particular its processes of capturing spontaneous images that carry an implicitly personal narrative. To deepen her knowledge of those experimental techniques, she enrolled in a multitude of drawing and painting workshops at the Carl Jung Institute in Chicago.
A 5-year sabbatical in 2011 took Tatiana to Switzerland where she started pursuing photography as her new medium. She devoted one year to learning the
technical aspects of this medium while simultaneously immersing herself in the history of photography and studying influential photographers of the twentieth century. Today, her photography work developed to the stage where she has begun to show her series and single images to an audience at large. In the past two years, private collectors in Switzerland and the US have acquired a select number of her limited edition prints.
In her creative process, Tatiana draws on her past experience with the fine arts by applying her love for simplicity of composition to a contemplative flow of photographing her subjects. She continuously pursues images that expose the hidden idiosyncrasies and apparent imperfections and transform the way she sees them into one of beauty and personal meaning.
See Tatiana's Photography.
Artist Statement
"My work centres on the theme of passage of time and the ensuing longing for things to remain the same. I am also drawn to discovering appreciation and beauty in the seeming imperfections within objects, places, and situations. I like to explore these themes with a temperamental subject matter and in a variety of scales – ranging from a macro focus to a panorama perspective.
In my process, I continuously experiment with each capture, slowly establishing a connection in the viewfinder by looking for nuances of colour and form in my subject, until a sense of inner essence and fragility can be experienced. It is my sincere hope that my audience can also experience this quiet reverie of deep affinity when viewing my images – an almost inexplicable sense of transformation from ‘before’ to ‘now,’ of seeing anew what had once seemed imperfect, ubiquitous, or incomplete.
I find my inspiration both internally and externally, tapping the former through the introspective practices of yoga, meditation, prayer, writing, and walking. The ‘outer’ inspiration comes from the works of the old masters of photography such as Brett Weston, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. Their combined legacies represent to me the epitome of quiet simplicity that has the power to turn even the most mundane subject matter into a profound soul stirring aesthetic with a timeless impact."