"Reflections" art works by Lada 

by Myrosia Stefaniuk 

As our world wavers in upheaval and turmoil on the eve of the new millennium, we begin to recognize that our external selves have become so severed from our inner selves that we are out of touch with our true nature. It's called the New Age" in which those who are willing to slow down enough, search anew for that sacred space where the inner and outer worlds meet. 

Our ancestors intuitively recognized the spirituality and wholeness of the universe, and they passed that knowledge to us through myth and ritual. But today, it is only the creative individuals who actively seeks and keeps that myth alive and who interprets the unseen for us. 

Sophia Lada, aka Lada, is such an artist. "Reflections", her most recent body of work of gouaches, paintings and drawings, fuses contemplation on the past with mirrored images of the present. 

"Seasonal rituals were part of our ancestors" daily lives", she comments. "Search for individuality and meaning was marked by these rituals, and the images I create have an intimate connection with the seasonal changes in my own life. It has been filled with turmoil, pain and joy, and putting it into visual form has been integral in my own healing process. 

The series is painted in multiples, like a film strip, where each frame or painting is important to the whole, like season, marking major passages of the human life cycle. Color, form, rhythm in repeated line and metaphor, are unifying elements that expand Lada's visual vocabulary. Her gouaches are treated with a watery blue, inspired by the light of the night sky in the Canadian prairies where Lada lived and worked for five years. A solemn meditative effect of all-encompassing blues, indigos, violets, accentuated by bronzes and golds, intensifies the connection between healing power and natural phenomena, the sky and sea. Using such universal metaphors for metamorphosis as reptiles, snakes, outreaching tree limbs, Lada interweaves the earth cycle and the movement of the heavens with the ongoing rhythms of life, death and regeneration. 

The viewer is immediately struck by the dominance of the female form in her work. Titles using words such as reflection, desire, unmasked, awakening, conformity, solitude,lunar visions, illumination, transformation, denote the growth process of an evolving consciousness. But that process is a baptism of fire. While the female forms, often doubled,resemble stylized manufactured mannequins, their faces reflect suffering, fragmentation, sadness, obscurity, entrapment, resignation. Their penetrative gaze reveals the untold: it is a gaze that projects a steel coldness, a charged defiance, a painful plea, a search for spiritual connection. Many of the figures hold their arms locked of bound and bolted over their hearts, as if to protect that which is within. They are set against a backdrop of repetitive elements: ever-present shadows of ancient female figures looming over metalic-like rectangles articulated by corner screws and intersected by variations on the mandala sphere, a symbol of unity and completeness. 

By juxtaposing Tripillian goddesses with their modern prototypes, Lada's visual commentaries provide a way for looking in and looking out. The mask, ancient symbol for spirituality, becomes the reflecting medium the empowers us to unearth our potential feelings, and permit a vision of what lies hidden even to ourselves. The artist lifts the veil between the real and the imaginary, between the dreamed and the conceived. 

For Lada, the spiritual culture of the Ukrainian people has been the inspiration and groundwork for the series. "Rituals, myths and folklore were always a part of the reality I grew up with. I'm fortunate to have been born into this heritage and feel it has given me the strength to understand my purpose," she states. 

That purpose is to explore the celebration and mystification of the female form in  

pre-Christian cultures, and examine it in the light of our contemporary image-conscious cultures demands to conformity. "In the universal search for inner meaning and spiritual connections are my own personal reflections on aging and acceptance, and the resulting conflict between the inner image of self and the outward compliance to society's standards," Lada explains. 

Those standards are the subliminal messages pounded daily into our consciousness, namely, that for men and women alike, beauty and power are totally a function of fashion, form and role. Lada's work attests that true essence is an internal light, a spiritual radiance that is non-material and non-physical. "My aim is not to recreate cult images of the past," she concludes, "but rather to create visual imagery of an inner reality that is felt and can be shared only through art. I want to compel the viewer to experience a spiritual feeling about the need of unifying human form with nature and thereby to recharge their own connection to the community and cosmos." 

The Ukrainian Weekly 

Sunday April 17, 1994