In the Middle Distance: An Interview with Artist Ayla Dmyterko

In a post-internet haze defined by frenetic image saturation, our compulsion for algorithmic visual consumption blurs coherence in technological fervour. What proliferates, then, is known as apophenia—the human tendency to derive connections from seemingly disparate objects. As archives and collections once confined to physical spaces become increasingly digitized, what traces linger within this technologically mediated framework, which are reinforced or, instead, altogether rewritten?

Ukrainian-Canadian artist Ayla Dmyterko’s practice investigates these questions, syncretizing metaphor and figurative imagery to (re)identify objects cross-pollinated between her home province of Saskatchewan and her ancestral lands in Ukraine. Currently based in Glasgow, Scotland, Dmyterko highlights each item’s plurality, disintegrating material hierarchies through the appropriation of found objects and materials—such as wooden shelves and molten beeswax—as frames for her paintings.

Evoking ritual and cultural memory, Dmyterko’s paintings—particularly her “Bread Baskets” series—foster dialogues surrounding the intersections of class, domestic labour, and migration. Addressing the accessibility of archives and visual references, this conversation parses her symbolic visual vocabulary, exposing the psychogeographies that reflect the transnational rhythms and layered temporalities at the heart of her practice.

Spanning time zones between Glasgow and Montréal, this interview—conducted over email and FaceTime—was collaboratively edited into its present form, unfolding as a dialogue informed by both distance and memory.

Maegan Beck (MB): I’m drawn to your use of the term “apophenia” to describe an approach to your research and creation. 

Can you describe the term’s significance for you?

Ayla Dmyterko (AD):  Apophenia is a psychological symptom used to describe psychosis—delusional and self-referential—characterized by over-interpretations of information.¹ Similar but not the same as a hallucination, existing today in the daze of the doom scroll.

I am interested in apophenia as a psychological aftermath of the oversaturation of images amid our contemporary post-internet era. In my works, I draw parallels between this collective reality and similar psychologies that have resulted from stereotyping, assimilation, and indoctrination.

Apophenia is caused by an attempt to associate, yet in doing so, a mercurial dissociation from the actual self results. When I propose apophenia as an artistic lens that I am viewing through, it is an absurdist gesture. Ultimately, I am critiquing a malady of slippery meaning-making that I recognize in my own way of grappling with digitized archival material, art history, and images floating around online.

MB: Positioning apophenia as a lens through which to see relationships between images, how does this condition affect the way you navigate archives, both online and material? 

AD: The first time that I worked with the idea of apophenia as a lens through which I was viewing images was a decade ago, although I didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet. It was in a series of paintings called “Missed en Abyme” that I completed in 2015 while studying under David Elliott at Concordia University in Montréal. The title refers to the French phrase “mise en abyme,” which translates to “placed in the abyss.” This is a technique where an image or narrative is embedded within itself, creating a sense of infinite repetition or self-reference. The images in my paintings were collaged onto the canvases in a nonuniform orientation, which was a decision I made to reflect the way that the processing of hurried digital media felt (for me)— overwhelming. I thought that by painting the images, they would be forced to slow down. 

As an artist, it is impossible to ignore the acceleration of images. Never before has our society been as deeply imbued with such a repertoire of masks to paint a picture of the self. It’s all very psychoanalytic, which is what I am most interested in. I want to understand our collective mood as we grapple with the often false relationships we have with objects, people, places, and archives through these highly accessible images and information. As we view them at such a fast pace and in relation to one another, there is a flattening and slicing of the surface. This can be a double-edged sword, as it both breaks down hierarchies but also negates deeper contextual meaning.

Certainly, apophenia affects the way I look at archives both online and in person, but I would say the severity lessens when it’s in person. It honestly just comes down to speed; it’s impossible to make such hastened linkages when you are wearing white gloves and handling archival objects. It reminds me of driving in the prairies: the foreground out the window, the ditch, is a nauseating flash of speeding colours, while the distance is clear. Once you stop your car and walk it off, you can finally breathe it all in.

MB: Do you believe there’s an ethical or emotional difference between researching in physical archives versus digital databases?

AD: Archives, both online and physical, are in a constant state of reassessment alongside shifting ethical concerns. I don’t believe that either physical or digital archives are more ethically sound than one another. Every archive is unique in its history, archivist team, and vision. This affects the way they parcel through their collection, and it is something that will constantly evolve. 

I believe that both elicit emotional responses, which are different but equally strong. Proximity to physical archives generates relation and deeper contemplation. There is an undeniable searing of memory when you can hold and spend time with an archival object. However, interacting with physical archives demands resources, including time, labour, and travel. Digital archives, alternatively, open collections for individuals without access to those resources. This extends the archive’s reach, promoting wider and more diversified research. 

This institutional transparency has occurred alongside reparations to the colonial legacies of archives. I remember contemplating ways I would be able to do my research in Eastern Europe. Now, I can access many of these archives online. Digitization projects in Ukraine currently act as a virtual record to protect cultural memory in a public way. They document artifacts, sites, and songs that have been going missing or are being destroyed during the current invasion by the Russian State. It’s very emotional. 

MB: In a world oversaturated by image and metadata, how do you decide what is worth preserving—or alternatively, (re)interpreting?

AD: I’m not sure this is fully up to me. It’s partially up to my algorithm, and then a slippery free association takes hold. There is a sense of loss of control, which is core to uncovering what is beyond the images. There is a lot of screenshotting, saving, and then triaging. It’s kind of like going to the Salvation Army and filling your cart, but then having to decide later what you actually need.

MB: Your paintings mine both online archives and ancestral memory; do you notice different outcomes arise from digital versus oral or inherited knowledge(s)?

AD: Yes—the curators of these two sources are very different. Online archives associated with institutions reflect the decisions of historical victors; the stories deemed worthy of national or institutional memory. Ancestral memory, on the other hand, hasn’t been edited—it’s raw, syncretic, and embodied.

MB: Is humour or absurdity—like the idea of “half-baked” gestures, or “dithyramb” rituals—part of your strategy for subverting canonical expectations of historical seriousness?

AD: The idea of the dithyrambic painting is something I lifted from artist Marcus Lüpertz.² A dithyramb is an ancient Greek choral hymn sung in dedication to the god Dionysus: the god of wine, fertility, insanity, ritual madness, and religious ecstasy. Lüpertz used the term as a device to upend distinctions between abstract and figurative painting into a singular, dynamic place. 

Thinking about dithyrambic painting, I wanted to critique my own hesitancies in the studio. My response is in the work Dichroic Glass, Dithyrambic Sun (2024), which details the Lycurgus Cup beneath a red-hot sun. This cup is made of dichroic glass that shifts colour based on the way that light passes through it. When I viewed it in person at the British Museum in London, I thought about how this technique mimics the way that pigment particles extend in oil paint mediums. This further mimics the way that soot particles hang in the sky during a forest fire or volcanic eruption, causing the sun to turn red and the skies to look apocalyptic. You know that sun; we saw it together when I was in residency in Montréal a few summers ago. 

MB: Simone Weil suggests that attention, at its most devoted, is a mystical gesture—an act of surrender rather than control.³ Does your process lean more toward that receptive attention, rather than mastery? 

AD: Yes. The Silver Cord (2023) is the title of a painting in my last exhibition. It is a term that reminds me of Simone Weil’s devoted attention as a mystical gesture. Agnes Martin used the idea of the “silver cord” to instruct her students to maintain their focus, to not be tempted by distractions, and to instead find total solace.⁴ I always imagined it as a lead rope, pulling you into a blinding field—what they call “volya” in Eastern Europe.

Something else that holds us all together is the act of failing. To paint, you must be prepared to be vulnerable. If what you seek is an answer, you might make a fool of yourself. When you fail, be humble in knowing that you are showing others that you are enlightened through welcoming the next questions; in doing this, you are also letting others know that we are not all so different.

MB: The prairie landscape is often steeped in settler mythologies of abundance and freedom, yet your work seems to engage its expansiveness as something equally spectral and fraught. How do you navigate this tension between inherited romantic imaginaries and the material and social realities of land, labour, and dispossession?

AD: My painting, The Middle Distance (2024), is a subversion of colonial posters that promoted emigration to Canada’s West in the early 1900s. I viewed the posters on the Library and Archives Canada’s collections website. If you haven’t seen them—lucky you, but to give a sense of the colonial tone: Healthy climate! Free schools! The new homeland! Harvest 100,000,000 bushels of grain! Rich virgin soil! Easy to reach, nothing to fear! Opportunity, why not embrace it?

I can see how this potential attracted over 180,000 Eastern European peasants to emigrate to Turtle Island. Following the abolishment of serfdom, there was extreme poverty and a lack of land in Western Ukraine. I can understand that given these conditions, flight mode set in upon the promise of vast, abundant, fertile lands elsewhere.

As settlers, my family were tools of the Canadian colonial project, which still causes acute physical and psychological trauma in Indigenous communities today. I am not sure if they were aware of this prior to arrival; however, I know that there was kinship among Ukrainians and their Indigenous neighbours. I cannot imagine how it must have felt to be dispossessed of their land back home due to Soviet collectivization, to arrive on land they believed to be free, only to realize they were now the ones possessing the lands of the dispossessed.

The Middle Distance reflects on this history and these beckoning posters. In my work, however, I shift the narrator from the government to those who had already arrived. This character—drawing upon stereotypical imagery of Eastern European “spy girls”—is initiated by auto-ethnographic research into my ancestors’ experiences being deemed “enemy aliens,” a term used to describe citizens of states legally at war with the British Empire residing in Canada during WW1. During the Cold War era, this xenophobia reemerged when Eastern Europeans were seen as allies to Soviet Bloc espionage projects. I am interested in the inherited concealment, alterity, repression, protection, and escape that has bled through the generations due to these experiences. This painting acts as a warning, with great care and concern for Ukrainians being forced to immigrate today due to the ongoing invasion.

The Middle Distance will be included in my upcoming solo exhibition, “Ring Around the Sun & We Rage On,” at Alma Pearl, in London (UK), opening in November. 

MB: Having been raised on Treaty 4 territory and later relocating to Québec and Glasgow, how has this geographic movement shaped your relationship to land-based memory and settler-colonial infrastructures? In what ways do occupation, resource extraction, and cultural erasure manifest differently across the Canadian prairies and the UK, given its role as both colonizer and architect of the Commonwealth?

AD: Over the past decade, I have been completing an accidental generational return. My family migrated from the Carpathian Mountains and Ivano-Frankivsk regions in Western Ukraine, through the Glasgow Port on the S.S. Letitia ship, which ported in Montréal, and then took a train to Saskatchewan. I have lived and worked as an artist in Saskatchewan, Montréal, and Glasgow. If I continue, my final destination is Ukraine. 

When I lived in Regina, I worked as an Arts Educator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. This role was formative to my understanding of the histories of Treaty 4 territory where I was born and raised. I learned through artists rather than history books.

When I decided to pursue being an artist, I wanted to study elsewhere to gain broader insight into contemporary art across Canada. During my BFA in Montréal, I began researching my generational past, which increasingly informed my practice. At the same time, I grappled with the ethical implications of working as a settler on Turtle Island. This led me to consider the UK—not as a place removed from colonialism, but as the heart of the Commonwealth, deeply entangled in its enduring imperial legacy. I felt it important to situate my work in relation to that history: not just to represent it, but to engage it ethically and critically.

MB: Luce Irigaray reclaims the vessel as a site of potentiality, not a void.⁵ How do symbolic and literal containers—baskets, bowls, glasses—transform as feminist symbols in your work? What do they hold, what are they refusing to contain, or instead, how do they address feminine presence, absence, or domestic labour?

AD: My vessels, metaphorically, contain artist-led actions that articulate agency and my unique subjectivity within the world. This is something that Irigaray describes when she speaks of vessels. Rather than being reduced to having a passive role as a vessel myself, my works become object-oriented ontologies that inherently create meaning.

In my breadbasket paintings, I was thinking about my “job” as an artist. Asia Bazdyrieva, in her article “No Milk, No Love,” describes the imaginary of Ukraine as a “breadbasket”—a land colonized through the “resourcification” of “its territory, natural resources, and people—as an operational space, merely a site for material transaction.”⁶ I was especially drawn to this essay because she describes the idea of Ukraine as a breadbasket, existing as an “imaginary that enables the making of a resource.” Considering the stereotype of the agrarian, female, Ukrainian subject as one to break the land, harvest the wheat, and bake the bread, the breadbasket became a vessel for these considerations.

MB: You reference materials that were once part of domestic life—beeswax, bread, old frames—but (re)contextualize them within global conversations. In what ways does the rural voice echo through your work, not just in subject or material, but in rhythm, silence, or scale?

AD: Materially, I often reflect on Svetlana Boym’s idea of “ruinophilia,” that “ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalising us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time.”⁷

I am the first generation in my family to be raised in an urban environment. The materials that I use in my practice have all been part of my life in one way or another. For example, the wax that I am currently using in my paintings comes from my mother’s apiary on Treaty 4. In the past, I have worked with wax from my friend Olia Kovalenko’s family apiary in Kudlai, Ukraine. “Strak Vylyvaty,” or “Pouring Forth the Fear,” is a ritual practice that consists of words, wax, and water that my Baba (or Grandmother) would practice on me when I had nightmares. I believed that the curdled wax was an objectification of my fear, which I would bury in her garden.

I’m not sure that I have thought about rhythm, silence, or scale before—those things all come intuitively. 

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Ayla Dmyterko (she/her) is a Ukrainian-Canadian artist currently based in the UK. She received her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and her BFA from Concordia University, Montréal. She looks forward to attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (US) and a solo exhibition at Alma Pearl (London, UK).

Maegan Beck (she/her) is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Montréal. Particularly drawn to the lingering tensions of memory across bodies and gestures, her work asks how we hold onto what is no longer here—highlighting how attention, care, and embodied knowledge make absence felt, legible, and luminous.

1. Klaus Conrad, Die beginnende Schizophrenie; Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns (Stuttgart: Thieme, 1958).
2. A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981–2018, curated by Norman Rosenthal, Almine Rech Gallery, London, October 2–November 17, 2018, https://www.alminerech.com/exhibitions/961-a-new-spirit-then-a-new-spirit-now-1981-2018-curated-by-norman-rosenthal.
3. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
4. Agnes Martin, Writings / Schriften, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Winterthur: Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 93.
5. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
   
6. Asia Bazdyrieva, “No Milk, No Love,” e-flux journal, no. 127 (May 2022), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/127/465214/no-milk-no-love/.
7. Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 43.

This article is published in issue 42.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue