Milena Dragicevic: Selected Works

Overview

I was born in former Yugoslavia, raised in Canada and received my art education in England, therefore, I am interested in making paintings which are a synthesis of my Western and Eastern European backgrounds, where ideas move between the sublime and the ridiculous. I use source material from a bank of disenfranchised and popular images, including modernist architecture, landscapes, propaganda posters, advertisements, constructivism, surrealism, social realism, film, portraiture, etcetera. These are interventions in what is already formulated whether a photograph, an object or a film still. The work operates using dynamics similar to Eisenstein's montage methods.

The recent works are related under a collective title "Reconstruction Isn't Easy". These include large figurative paintings using architecture of leisure centres such as diving boards, ski jumps, car parks, etcetera. Here, the modulation of colour charts combines with 3-D iconic images in order to imply a flux or a shifting of fixed elements. Another painting features the double image of an androgynous accordion player with vampiric overtones, while other works use rotating landscapes and portraiture to touch upon issues of melancholia. These works turn and flip things conceptually and compositionally, which cause their narratives to proceed in stops and starts. Both abstract and figurative paintings, are sourced to achieve a contradiction between perspective and flatness. All these paintings act as metaphors for descent and ascent, thereby providing a new context from a set of potentialities. The collective title "Reconstruction Isn't Easy" discloses the multiples of meaning latent in the iconic references specific to the ideology and present day condition of post-Communist states.