"One letter — one breath —
is all it takes
to turn war into warm.
Art lives in that fragile distance
between destruction and tenderness,
trying quietly
to restore the missing "M" —
to return the world to life."
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, December 5, 2025 from 6:00-9:00pm.
Ukrainian photographer Olga Volianska has made significant strides in the fine art photography scene since her solo exhibition at The Cardinal in the Spring of 2023, earning international recognition for her evocative and experimental work. Her recent endeavours reflect a deep engagement with themes of resilience, transformation and the interplay between humanity and nature.
Living and creating in Odesa, Ukraine, Volianska has been working on several series and her work has garnered numerous awards and accolades.
"My projects Blackout, or 100 Days to Spring and the Beginning of Life and Hoping were created as two chapters of one inner journey — from darkness toward light.
Olivia Laing wrote:
"Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises."
Blackout was born in the winter of 2022, during the most difficult months of the war, when Ukrainian cities lived without electricity and the days felt endlessly short. For me, art became a way to survive, to hold my mind and spirit together. I collected dried flowers during summer, saved them as fragile reminders of warmth, and later combined them with glass, salt, and rare rays of sunlight to create images. These works carry both despair and persistence — they are fragile experiments in making life visible even when the world outside seemed to dissolve in darkness.
Hoping began with my aerial photographs of the pink lakes of the Azov region, taken before the invasion. After the war reached this place, those radiant ecosystems turned into cracked, dry ground. I returned to the images, painting over them by hand, layer by layer, as if preserving what could no longer exist. It was an intimate process, almost like stitching memory to reality — my way of asking how landscapes, like people, endure erasure and transformation.
For me, these two series are not separate. They reflect the same desire: to keep searching for signs of life, to hold on to fragile beauty even when it is threatened with disappearance. Darkness and light are not opposites here but intertwined states, where the possibility of renewal is always hidden inside loss."
-Olga Volianska
