about

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For the past decade, Tyna Ontko has worked across sculpture, installation, drawing, sound, and photography. By both augmenting and playing to the visual language of exhibition spaces, Tyna’s environments posit architecture as an unfixed and transforming influence which shapes and is shaped by those who live through it. Her sculptures consider the role that institutional set-building plays in the construction of collective memory within and outside of archival structures, by asking which histories are maintained here? Whose speculative futures are being prepared for? In her work, domestic and archival spaces merge and overlap, producing different stages on which preservation and decay play out.

Tyna received a BFA in Printmaking from Western Washington University. She has since attended residencies at ACRE in Steuben, WI, La Wayaka Current in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont among many others. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with exhibitions including those at Gallery 4Culture, Kunsthalle Kohta, and the Tacoma Art Museum. She has been the recipient of regional and national funding including a Cy Twombly Graduate Fellowship through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Undergraduate Fellowship through the Southern Graphics Council International. Tyna splits her time between her hometown of Seattle, WA, where she was recently nominated as a finalist for the Neddy Artist Award in the Open Medium Category (2022), and Richmond, VA where she is currently in the process of earning an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2025).

Unless stated otherwise, all documentation photography is courtesy of Josh True.