Weight of Light Painting

Zhanna Tsytsyn is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work exists at the intersection of personal history, myth, ecology, and speculative imagination. Born in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and raised between her father’s Russian homeland and her mother’s roots in Kobuleti, Georgia, she immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. This layered, multicultural upbringing shapes a practice deeply attuned to questions of identity, displacement, and the ways environment informs consciousness. Working across painting, sculpture, and mask-making, Tsytsyn draws on both traditional artisanal methods and critical cultural inquiry. Her practice is rooted in Ecosomatics, honoring the profound interconnectedness of body, land, and all living organisms. Through this lens, she investigates the myths and foundational stories that underlie personal identity and collective ideology—stories that reveal how we construct, inherit, and challenge the narratives of our time. Tsytsyn’s visual language emerges through an intuitive, tactile process using oil paint, earth pigments, clay, foraged botanical materials, and new media forms. Drawing on Slavic mythologies, Siberian shamanism, historical epics, American Westerns, and science fiction, Tsytsyn weaves past and present, fact and fiction into complex narrative structures. Monsters, animals, feminine figures, and hybrid beings populate her chimeric worlds, revealing the power of speculative storytelling to illuminate truths that realism cannot. Themes of futurity, ecology, femininity, migration, and globalization recur, with the feminine body positioned as both a map of our contemporary landscape and a site of resistance. Through her work, Tsytsyn invites viewers into a space of stillness, reflection, and mythic possibility—a return to the body, the ecosystem, and the elemental forces that shape both personal and collective futures. She lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.