Most of these mixed media works are inspired from photographs that I found in my Grandmother’s collection of family photos after my father’s death in 2015.  They reveal a story never spoken to me about the generations of Polish family members that make up my family, and the ones who traveled from Poland to America to start a new life at the turn of the 20th century.  Josef & Francziska Podleszanski shows how my great grandparents may have felt like aliens, or may have been perceived as aliens, once having arrived to this foreign land.

Hunter / Hunted came from the obsession in my family with hunting, and furthermore, the long tradition of hunting in the Polish culture. Although some pieces are serious, like Deer on Plymouth, 1958, (My 16 year old father and his father killed those. I am not sure if that was my father’s first big kill), other pieces like, Mary Kraska & Albert Polashenski (Grandparents), are more playful, where their heads are on the table, like taxidermy, after being killed.  Polish Birds are the men in the family who hunt.  But I’ve transformed them into the birds….if they move, they will no longer be camouflaged.  And this is survival of the fittest.