SteviAnn Matijevic

Artist Statement

As a first-generation Eastern European artist, my work in drawing and plaster sculpture is a meditation on the inherited history and search for belonging and placement. I am drawn to the raw nature of plaster, a material that is both fragile yet sustainable, much like the stories of my lineage and the existing memories of those who raised me. My drawings, often fragmented echo these narratives of displacement and adaptation through line, form and composition.
Recently in my practice I have been investigating service and loyalty. Who do we serve?—those who raised us, a higher power, our communities, our own ambitions? How do our taught systems of faith and labor shape us? My work interrogates the sacred and asks; What does it mean to worship and how do you do so? Through ritual, cultural expectation, or personal sacrifice?
My sculptures are casted figures, architectural in form, that evoke thoughts of absent memories resembling relics, both ancient and suspended in time. In my drawings, I capture fragmentations of memories, most recently places where I have been served and the faces of those who have served me. These works are not just about looking back; they are about questioning how we carry the weight of history forward, how we carve out meaning in the spaces between exile and home.
Ultimately, what do we hold as sacred and how do we hold space for those moments.