My whole life I worked in newspapers. There was a dark storage room in Tambov Courier editorial office with piles and piles of weekly issues. Floor-to-ceiling rows of A3 trash. Typography excess - two years archive. Headlines and news columns rotting unattended, unopened. I was a 17 years old reporter with an ambition of a photographer, even artist perhaps, and I sneaked into that room once. I had a camera on a tripod with me. I’ve heard a mouse rustling some pages. It smelled like dry bread and instant coffee. I had a vision of myself positioned comfortably upfront, with the Archive Paper Giant in the background, in all its glory.

Surrounded by printed words doomed for an infinite storage incarceration.

These days I have my own newspapers archive. New York Post daily issues, from January to May 2024. Each one of them traveled from a News Corp building on MTA train with me while I was working there in a photo department. I went through hundreds of articles, creepy news and crime reports, selecting juicy meanings, very special to me. I checked out mugshots and celebrity galleries, I remembered Andy Warhol - he loved tabloids and copied front pages obsessively, with a pencil.

I’m not here for the pencils. I like cut-outs and neon paints. I see these headlines as a part of my identity now. They are reminders of those days. They are memories of loud newsroom talks. They are my emotions experienced on a day of the paper release. And it’s all saved in print and released to the public.

I glue them onto canvases and tell my own tales. I feel so seen.

Creating an art piece is not enough. Just like a newspaper, it has to find its reader. And so my performance has been taken to the streets.

It was a lively Friday night in Harlem, I put my collages and paintings on display, I worried. A fat rat ran by, I thought of luck. I kept working on canvases adding headlines - ignoring rodents and thinking of 2023 Rat Czar story - where is she now? Yesterday’s news. The headlines are still here though. People stopped by and asked questions. Mostly about rats. But they also just wanted to know my story. The truth is, such experiences cannot be kept in a dark room with the dreadful future. They look much better on brick walls, exposed.