While a name is a cosmic prison, identity is its guardian. As a Romanian immigrant to the United States, I live in and between two diametrically opposed cultures; from a totalitarian regime to a society in which individuality and information are emphasized. I often dwell upon the relationship of my identity to my displacement, and the ways I have devised to reconcile these incongruous elements. To translate this dilemma formally, my current body of work tackles the dichotomy between containment and liberation by infusing a static diagram with a charge that propels it into motion.
The elements I incorporate in my visual lexicon are either borrowed directly or paraphrased from several disparate arenas including Eastern European folklore, architecture, and topography. Collectively these references create complex and fractured allegorical “maps” of my physical, emotional and intellectual journey. I regard these maps as a means to explore loss itself as a form of identity, an identity that transforms the schema of containment into ritualized forms of self-expropriation.
