My name is Maja Ruznic and I am 25 years
old. I received my BFA from UC Berkeley and my MFA from the California
College of the Arts (CCA). I currently live and work in San Francisco.
I moved to San Francisco as a refugee in 1995. My family and I settled
in SF and I have been in the Bay Area ever since. I love it here. I
recently went back to Bosnia to visit (after 17 years), and my time
there has definitely influenced the kind of work that I am making now.
Here is a little artist statement:
The subjects in my paintings
are anti-heroes. Displaced and frenzied, they represent the destruction
of national identity and nostalgia for a historical past. I am
interested in how stories of war are passed through generations and how
violence, in the form of emotional residue is experienced through
intergenerational consciousness. I am drawn to objects and people that
suggest failure, death and disorder. These damaged subjects become my
visual lexicon through which I attempt to tell stories of loss. The
painting becomes a space where incidents from my everyday life are used
to tell stories from the past. In the process of creating, however, the story becomes even more distorted and the painting transcends a
fixed narrative, penetrating into the world of the sticky grotesque.
