Mila Kostic

Mila Kostic is Canadian visual artist and curator. After a promising start as an artist in former Yugoslavia, she moved to Vancouver in 1996 with her family. She has worked as a curator, educator, and as facilitator of visual and community-based arts, working with diverse artists and organizations representing multiple disciplines. She has been actively exhibiting and making art for over twenty years.

Mila has spearheaded many of her own artistic projects and has been associated in particular with promoting modern art in British Columbia and Canada. Mila is known predominantly for her large-scale abstract acrylic and oil paintings on canvas. Her work revolves around the experimentation with lines and colour; and thematically on the processes of creating a painting.

During the last twenty years of her career, Mila created a series entitled “Writings on the Wall”. This series was the result of an interest in the cracks of walls, surface textures, lines, and street art (i.e. graffiti). She integrates these facets of her interest in combination with lyrical prose.

Most recently, Mila has created “The Borders Series” a collection of works focused on the every day; a compound of private, social and political events. These events range from the significant to the mundane, and Mila explores the impact of these events on the individual; the light touches and the deep marks. Which are processed both consciously and subconsciously, Mila seeks to articulate these events into her work through the framing device of the border.

Particularly, through the breaching or crossing of these borders as events in her life, Mila is interested in this concept as it presents a variety of experiences. As not all border crossings elicit words of welcome; borders allow some to be on the inside, while forcing others to remain on the outside. This applies not only to territorial borders, but also to borders between identities, genders, ethnicities, classes, sexualities; borders between private and public, between “self” and “other”.

Presently, she added a new series of work entitled “Fragments”. The “Fragments Series”, is a comprised of private, personal and social events in which some may be found to be significant, life-changing, or even hard to shake. Thus, leaving a deep impression, it is natural extension from her early work to the present day.

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