Masha Granich is a storyteller. They see this as a result of growing up in Ukraine, where a mix of Orthodox faith, pagan rituals, and folkloric culture cultivates people who can entertain themselves endlessly by making up stories. Most other labels, however, seem to slip off the artist and their work. They favour the fleeting over the fixed, the experience over the object. Each work navigates the balance foundational to their practice: balance between individual experiences and shared Ukrainian cultural identity; between fast-paced, intuitive creation and laborious, meticulous realism; and between nostalgic archiving and illusive memory.
Granich’s career as an artist developed across the many cities they call home. Born in Kherson, Ukraine, they moved to Canada as a young teen and began studying printmaking and publications at OCAD University. In 2021, they moved to Montreal and opened Rest Stop Studio, a collaborative community hub for all kinds of creatives from tattoo artists to weavers. The people Granich features in their surreal ballpoint pen images are also immigrants from Ukraine. Of the fifteen family members who left as the war started, the young cousins—who were paid $10 to stay still as Granich took photos—provided a unique artistic challenge. “It feels like a bit of a race against time,” Granich said about trying to capture them in the midst of rapid childhood changes. The children have grown in height and maturity every time the family gets together, so the photographs become an archive of each shed past self. Modelled after digitized collages of these images, the artworks also serve to rebuild a record of the family—they had lost all their family photos fleeing the country. Though it’s not a complete replacement, Granich said the drawings “belong to this invented family album they no longer have.”
Choosing the images, composition, and framing is mostly intuitive and unplanned. “The fast part comes from going through a big archive of images and figuring out what symbols work together,” Granich said. “There is a component that feels almost random [...] and then you render it and all of a sudden you're surprised by the result.” Boredom is partially what keeps them from fully planning each piece from the beginning. The unusual frames—a mix of antique doors, stained glass, soldered metal, carved wood, and trampolines with chicken feet—arise out of a desire to explore the combinations and connections between the symbols present in their life. This playful process also allows for a certain kind of healing; it is as much about resilience as it is about entertainment. “I've always worked with themes of identity and culture and heritage and folklore,” they said, “and right now, the culture, identity, and heritage are [at] war. So it's so heavy on its own. It's not possible to exist in a suspended state of just intensity all the time.”
Compared to the quick arrangement of reference photographs, rendering the drawings using ballpoint pen on canvas is an incredibly prolonged journey. The choice of medium is ultimately less about the final image and more about the process. Ballpoint pens are incredibly tactile, smell like a child’s school notebook, and are impossible to erase. In Granich’s eyes, “It's like working with an imperfect substrate and an imperfect medium.” It’s not easy, but the commitment, attention, and time required to bring the images to life are key to the process. Granich got their start as an artist painting icons for the Orthodox church in Ukraine and the devoted approach to creation stayed with them. “Laboring over the canvas,” they said, “feels a little prayer-like.” By the time they send their work out into the world, it has gained the preciousness of a well-loved altar or family photo album.
Exhibitions in public spaces enable the next part of the artwork’s process. To Granich, seeing what happens when art goes out into the world is as important as attaching each piece to a specific theme. “You learn a lot about what you do,” Granich said. “I know that this means things to me, but I'm really curious what it might mean to somebody else.” It becomes a collaborative process in which unique sentiments are born every time a new viewer walks into the gallery. As expected, some Slavic viewers recognized the connections between interwoven Eastern symbols. The surprise came when Granich saw how this cultural nostalgia was felt across a much wider audience; in the melancholic blue drawings, people from diverse diasporas saw their own experiences of loss, resilience, and shifting memory.
These cross-cultural moments are fundamentally made possible by Granich’s commitment to accessibility. Watching their family—the very people featured in their art—feel alienated in gallery spaces pushed them to create work based on access points and building connections. Clear, digestible, and familiar symbols provide springboards for the imagination. Granich also uses tactility to bring people literally closer to their work, tempting the natural human instinct to touch with trampolines and silky braids of hair. Children apprehensively play with the bells and twist keys in locks, slowly getting comfortable exploring the gallery space.
Granich saw this effect especially when people realized everything was done with a ballpoint pen: “There’s an immediate like ‘Oh, okay. I know how that feels to do.’”
So much of Granich’s work is deeply personal and private. The changing faces only they know, the hours spent capturing transient visions of their past. Yet, they ultimately leave their work out for the public. Open to new interpretations and filled with unguided mystery, each artwork gives viewers the chance to explore their own stories within Granich’s surreal landscape of memories.
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