Artist explores repulsion and attraction in MHCC’s Fireplace gallery

Hanging in the Fireplace Gallery currently at MHCC is a series called “Making the Best of the Bleak,” by Tatyana Ostapenko.

The paintings are a series of pictures and moments that bring attention to average people who live in strife, including political and social upheaval, due to the recent history of the former Soviet Union as it broke into Russia and several separate republics.

The paintings were chosen because they depict “social ambivalence, political uncertainty, and the daily lives of people caught in the midst of momentous changes,” Ostapenko wrote in her artist statement

She continued, “I’m after the familiar yet confounding, commonplace yet unsettling, the uncannily mundane, and the ordinary strangeness.  My subjects’ confusing and confounding motivations expose the rudderless and rapidly shifting environs of the places torn off from established meaning.

“I wish to communicate the reluctant repulsion/attraction I feel toward my place of origin, and to expose the sentimentality of nostalgia as well as an émigré’s moral difficulty at passing judgments on the land left behind,” she wrote.

Each picture tells a different story, and these are stories she chose to make a viewer think or be more aware.

The people are used as part of the scene as to depict a whole social and historical aspect. In the paintings they are individual, yet don’t stand out as the main focus, with turned heads, partial features, or blurry or less-defined characteristics that somehow enhance the emotion of the image.

Ostapenko was born and raised in the part of the former Soviet Union that is now independent Ukraine.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts (studio practice) from Portland State University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and International Business from Georgia State University.

She’s been painting for only three years and appreciates the separation of the art world from the business-social world. She likes how the separation can help with a different perspective because for an artist it is too easy to get lost in creation, she said.

Making the Best of the Bleak

Fireplace Gallery in the MHCC Student Union, Feb. 2-26.

Tatyanaostapenko.com