This work is an amalgamation of random memories, confusing dreams, stray thoughts, bits of old conversations, and flashes of uninvited inspirations, all carefully gathered, cropped, and meticulously stitched together into a metaphorical quilt.

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The work offers the viewer two very distinct visual experiences: that of a bystander and that of an active participant. The bystander is presented with a view of plain white pedestals: their proportions and sizes vary, but their appearance is bleak and predictable. To the active participant, however, these are the unique worlds of discovery and wonder.

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These pedestals are human tropes: mass-produced, blank, and cold, they represent our view of nameless people in a crowd. Plain and uninspiring when seen from afar, the pedestals reveal their unique content to those willing to put themselves on the spot and become vulnerable. As one might get a glimpse of someone’s psyche through a window of conversation, one might investigate the mind of a pedestal through a miniature opening in its side.

The interiors of the pedestals are surreal rooms elaborately furnished and decorated with an array of ordinary objects, loose body parts, bones, animal heads, household items, and architectural elements. Most of the objects populating the interiors come into existence when a said word or a fleeting memory trigger in me a strong desire to physically visualize a given object. That object, in turn, might inspire a lengthy string of random associations, resulting in the creation of more objects. Thus, the rooms are three-dimensional collages of seemingly unrelated elements arbitrarily arranged according to something logical or contextual, but often purely aesthetic principles.

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These interiors possess a dream-like quality of coherent chaos: various components coming together in curious ways to generate intriguing visuals. Different scales of objects remind one of the Alice-in-Wonderland-like transformations, competing for attention figures saturate the space, and hidden messages add a layer of mischief.  Doors and windows, create an illusion of the space expanding beyond its visible boundaries, hinting at undiscovered potential, and colorful lights further this mystery.

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These colorful, moody, confusing, fascinating, and complex interiors are trapped inside the empty shells of pedestals as people get trapped inside their heads, and as I am trapped inside mine. Once given the freedom to do almost anything and presented with the infinite possibilities of creative expression I inevitably found myself thinking and working inside the box. Box, as a metaphor of one’s mind, is a storage container for thoughts, memories, opinions, fears, and desires; working within the confines of a box allows me to organize my mind by stringing together random thoughts, assigning every object a particular place and creating order out of chaos.