photo credit: Hanna Dolzhenkova
Sofya Belinskaya makes paintings and drawings about the fragmented nature of memory and our relationship to place. As a Ukrainian-American immigrant, she centers the question: how do we remember places to which we cannot return? She focuses on stories of migration to investigate how we create narratives about what we bring with us and what we leave behind.
Her images explore the boundary between dream and reality, presence and absence. She weaves together markers of place and identity: plants, buildings, hands, faces and furniture merge and dissolve into each other. The resulting visual forms create fractured landscapes that echo how time and the emotional nature of memory form our understanding of past and present. Her work is an attempt to preserve against forgetting, while delicately holding the experience of loss and the impermanence of being.
Sofya Belinskaya is a Ukrainian-American painter and draftswoman, born in Donetsk, Ukraine, residing in Seattle, WA. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 4Culture, Linda Hodges Gallery, Gray Sky Gallery, and Bellevue Art Museum. She received awards and grants from 4Culture and Williams Artists for Artists Prize in Drawing. She is an artist-member of SOIL Gallery in Seattle. She holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, 2011. As a member of Lion’s Main Collective (2013-2017), a multi-disciplinary queer and trans art collective, she created collaborative projects including SAM’s Art in the Park Program, Henry’s Art Gallery Open House, and King Street Station. She is a teaching artist, who has worked with institutions including Pratt Fine Arts Center, Meta Open Arts, and Amazon Expression Lab.
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