ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sasha Yakovleva is a Toronto-based emerging artist whose work explores identity, memory, and the multidimensionality of the diasporic experience. Working across painting, drawing, and mixed media, she combines acrylic and oil techniques with tactile materials such as beads, textiles, and found objects to create layered compositions that bridge personal and collective narratives. Her practice reflects on the formation of self, belonging, and inherited memory. Currently in her fourth year in Drawing & Painting at OCAD University, Sasha continues to expand her visual language through experimentation with materiality and storytelling. Her work has been exhibited in group shows across Toronto, including Face Off, Springboard, and The Way We Draw at the Ada Slaight Gallery, as well as Faces and Traces: A Cross-Border Portrait Project at Stackt North Hall Gallery. Sasha is also a current participant in From Our Point of View: Encounters with Artists, a year-long visiting artist research project led by Max Dean.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a visual artist with a particular interest in creating works, including paintings, drawings, and mixed media, that explore the themes of fragmented identity and intergenerational survival. My practice is grounded in a personal and family history that is shaped by the diaspora and exile of the post-Soviet era. By examining the mechanics of identity formation, fragmentation, and memory reconstruction, I explore the workings of craft traditions blended with realism. The materials used in my work include oil, acrylic, and found objects to create a film of direct action and story, where touch has taken on a form of recall. The practice is a reflection of the memory and survival stories that have defined my life, and the archives of the self are the tools for creating visual languages, which bring the past and the present together and consequently, reconcile them.