Meet the Artist

Nadiya

Svirsky

Printmaking & Painting

“ I visualise episodic memory as an interstitial realm between our physical reality, our experiences and our sense of self. I have come to consider memory as a vast phenomenon that becomes a place, or realm, unto itself over time, through accumulation, bricolage and erasure of numerous experiences, layered over one another; a domain that is separate from the material world and physical experience. This realm is the subject of my fixation, a realm I yearn to immerse myself and others in through my work. The decayed memory, rewritten, reconstructed over and over takes a new form over time. It becomes more abstracted, less specific and rooted in reality; more symbolic, mythologized. A stairwell becomes a portal to a different time and a different feeling. A restaurant becomes a wreck; in memory, it is reassembled as a fortress. I feel compelled to visually depict this process through painting, printmaking, casting, and layering.

Profile Picture
Profile Picture
divider
Nadiya Svirsky is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in printmaking, painting and sculpture. Born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1996, Svirsky has been living, learning and working in Toronto, Canada since 2002. Svirsky’s main preoccupations lie in themes of memory, in-betweenness, heritage, and depictions of moments that connote the passage of time. Svirsky’s creative practice (mainly comprised of multi-plate etching, painting and lithography) is intrinsically tied to the process-based nature of the works that she makes - working and reworking images in variation through painting and printmaking mirrors the mental and emotional processes of retrospection itself. Through these processes, Svirsky explores the tension created by trying to depict or preserve something so elusive as memory and the liminal spaces it occupies. Svirsky is graduating from OCADU with a BFA majoring in Printmaking and a minor in Drawing & Painting.
OCAD U - Faculty of Art
Printmaking & Publications
Major Completed, 2021
OCAD U - Faculty of Art
Drawing and Painting
Minor Completed, 2021

Intaglio Printmaking Painting (Oil, Acrylic, Watercolour) Bronze Casting Portraiture Lithography Relief Printmaking Bookbinding

2021, ReBuilding The Memory Space
GradEx 106, OCAD U
2020, Double Mirror
Anniversary Gallery, OCADU, Toronto
2019, Unknowable, Unknowing
OCADU Great Hall, Toronto
2015, THREE
Autumn Gallery, Toronto
2014, Nadiya Svirsky: Room 100
Etobicoke School of the Arts, Toronto
2014, Draft Collective: Self Help
9 Davies, Toronto
2014, Year-End Show
Etobicoke School of the Arts, Toronto
2014, Future Curators: A Study in Action/Reaction
Larkin Art Gallery, Buffalo
2013, Future Curators: Introspection, Interaction
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
divider