Maja Ruznic (b. 1983 Bosnia & Hercegovina) received a BFA from University of California, Berkeley, CA (2005) and an MFA from California College of Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009). She currently lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico, USA.

Ruznic is primarily a painter, drawing on personal and collective memories to create works that deeply connect with human psyche. Allowing for figures to emerge from the thin layers of oil paint she applies to the canvas, the characters seemingly coalesce with their environments. She describes the process of painting as trying to remember a dream, touching on Bracha L. Ettinger’s theories of ‘matrixial borderspace’: the space of shared effect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory.

Ruznic deftly weaves themes of trauma and suffering with mythology and healing, softening the darker subject matter in her work. This softening is then applied to the process of painting – scumbling, blurring and allowing shapes to bleed into one another – symbolically destabilizing borders. Playing with ambiguity, the paintings lie on the threshold of form, which Ruznic compares to a thought or a feeling that precedes language. She looks to evoke transitional moments, like dawn and dusk, containing illuminating and eternal qualities. This timelessness permeates the paintings, tracing journeys and rituals, histories and secrets. Nostalgic and empathetic, the works ultimately speak of human experience.

The Call (2019) is from Ruznic’s most recent series of paintings, Sleep Seekers, in which the colours and values have shifted from a saturated palette to more muted hues, the figures dissolving into the space that holds them. The paintings are light, airy and have a transparent veil like quality. Ruznic states:
‘I imagine the figures inside of these veils dancing, travelling, and enacting rituals to cope with their unfortunate circumstances. They are both refuges but also shamans and shapeshifters. They can change their own destinies through movement.’ (Maja Ruznic, 2019)

The Sleep Seekers are, as the title suggests, in need of sleep on their endless journey towards an unclear destination. It is in their fluid, not knowing state that the characters’ creativity and magical powers lie. The figures in this series are predominantly women and they are engaging in rituals, evoking Ukazanje. Ukazanje is a Bosnian word for a type of message received through a supernatural channel. Ruznic also views her own process as Ukazanje, in applying stains of paint, then relying on the figures to appear. Ruznic likens this to the mystic power she experienced as a child, of her grandmother telling women’s futures from the remains of their coffee cups.

The Call features a girl on the brink of puberty, looking up towards the sky. Ruznic imagines the young woman as both Ukazanje itself as well as Ukazanje being what she is searching for. This is a time of physical and spiritual transformation for our protagonist. The delicate handprints are the hands of ancestors or helpers guiding her through this transition.