This is the last project I worked on with my aunt Natasha who died at the age of 39 from breast cancer. Its a 3d dragon mask that we started to cut out but never finished. This was right at the time when my grandmother decided that it would be best if I stopped seeing my her because she wanted to protect me from a dying person. Though we were still in the same apartment, we were completely isolated from each other for over two years until her death. I remember waiting for her to get home every day and hoping she would want to continue to work on the mask, sometimes she would but gradually without me realizing, it was like she didn't exist anymore. Recently I started to wonder if she made the decision not to see me anymore or if it was all my grandmother.

I was protected from her and her illness and she was protected from knowing anything about what was going on in the family. We didn't tell he we got a cat, because she really liked cats and would want to see it. Then we didn't tell her we were moving to the US because she was hopeful that medical care was better there and they might be able to cure her, it would have been hard to tell her we couldn't take her.

Natasha was really unlike anyone in our family, she shot slides before personal cameras were common, traveled as far throughout Europe as the Soviet regime allowed. She told me all about the customs of different cultures and cultivated my interest in art. She valued creativity and independence and was a true self learner. She was used to hardships, was fatherless for part of her childhood, lost her hair due to alopecia unversalis as a teenager, had a brief marriage and an abortion and cancer at a very early age, and through all of this she remained completely in love with living life. I'm really greatfull for the brief time we had together as well as the photographs of our family she left behind.