In reality, they are close-ups of the remnants of buildings ravaged by war in Ukraine.

And through Oct. 20th, the colorful photographs created by Iva Sidash are filling the spaces of a small gallery in the heart of this city’s college campus.

Sidash, 29, a native of Lviv, Ukraine, had no intention of becoming a war photographer. Her focus since 2019 had been on street photography, documentary work and more recently images for a Ukrainian news organization.

But in February 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s Russian army invaded her country, Sidash (who initially thought she might volunteer as a driver or aide worker) began using her Fujifilm digital camera to help tell the world about her country’s plight.

Her work has been part of international exhibits in France, Spain, Singapore, Germany and in her home country’s capitol of Kyiv. But “The Wall: Witness to the War in Ukraine,” which opened Monday at Roberta’s Art Gallery at UW-Whitewater, is Sidash’s first solo exhibit. The display of her 19 photographs and a television screen scrolling through dozens of more broader images of the war’s victims became even more pronounced on Tuesday when Sidash appeared in person at a reception to further explain her work and add more context to her work.

“For me, each and every detail matters,” Sidash said, during a question and answer period before a crowd of more than 60 people. “I just felt a great need to do something more.”

Sidash was a finalist of the International Fujifilm Moment Street Photo awards in 2021 and her work has been recognized by the International Center for Photography in New York, where she is spending the next eight months in a fellowship designed to better hone her photography skills.

Her exhibit in Whitewater and her week-long visit to southern Wisconsin came about after Craig Schriener, who spent 16 years as a photojournalist for the Wisconsin State Journal and is now a photographer at UW-Whitewater, began following Sidash’s work on Facebook prior to the war.

Schreiner has spent more than 30 years documenting life in the Midwest and in 2013 wrote and took the photos for a book documenting a small family farm near Pine Bluff west of Madison. But when the war in Ukraine began, Schreiner’s keen eye was drawn first to a selfie Sidash had taken with her cell phone in which she was sheltering in a cellar with her cat, Tommy. A day later, she posted another photo, this one of two soldiers carrying a disabled person across train tracks at a train station where Ukrainian refugees had gathered to escape the war’s danger. 

Other images would follow. They would include funerals, hollowed out buildings, destroyed cars and tanks rumbling down a road littered with debris. Others would show the innocence of children and the elderly, destroyed barns in the countryside and of cemeteries filled with Ukrainian flags, flowers and photos of those who have perished in the war.

“I think she’s a high-level combination of photojournalist and an artist,” Schreiner said. “I wasn’t expecting that Iva would be here but she wanted to come because this was important for her. I think when you are trying to understand or trying to begin to understand something hard, like war or cancer or racism, it really helps to have direct contact with someone who has experienced that. I think that is going to be a great value, this experience, for a lot of people.”

Sidash arrived in Wisconsin on Sept. 22 and is staying with Schreiner and his wife, Lisa, at their home in Middleton. Besides the opening reception, Sidash was the focus of a talk on Monday at UW-Whitewater by Abigail Lewis, a University of Notre Dame historian who researches art and visual culture during times of war. Sidash was also scheduled to speak Thursday afternoon at UW-Madison’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia and spent Wednesday giving presentations to art and social studies students at Janesville Craig and Parker high schools.

The principal donor for Sidash’s exhibit and travel expenses to Wisconsin is Susan Van Galder, whose husband’s family founded a Janesville bus company in 1947. Susan is a retired art teacher and a UW-Whitewater graduate and her son is an art teacher at Parker High School.

“I was so impressed with her knowledge of photography, and not just her working the camera, but what she sees with her camera,” Van Galder said Tuesday as she surveyed the colorful images in the gallery. “These almost look like paintings but they’re actually parts of beat up, bombed out walls. It’s spectacular the way she gets perspective with the color juxtaposition. Through art and photography you can create a story of your history and that’s what she’s doing.”

Sadish is a graduate of Lviv Polytechnic National University and thought she would have a career in project management. But photography became her calling. Her work has been published in the Financial Times of London; Fisheye Magazine in France and Der Spiegel in Germany. Her photographs are among those that also help illustrate a book of Ukrainian poetry that tells the story of the war’s devastating affect on the country.

And now the international audience of Sidash’s work can include students at UW-Whitewater, some who helped develop the exhibit. They were the ones who downloaded, edited and mounted Sidash’s photos onto rectangular pieces of foam core for display in the 1,000-square-foot gallery that was founded in 2008. The poster to promote the exhibit was designed by a student and students worked with gallery staff to set up the exhibit.

On Tuesday, it was Angela Malo, a student director of the gallery, who interviewed Sidash during the reception and led a question and answer period with the audience where Sidash explained how in spring 2022 she began focusing on walls of residential buildings in North Saltivka, an area located in the northeastern region of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. The project would then expand to the regions of Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv and Donetsk.

“Everybody who touched those photos cared about them,” Schreiner said. “When you have an experience like that it’s something you remember for a long time.”

Sidash’s first image of a wall came from a driveway of a high rise building heavily damaged by Russian shelling. Moments later she went inside to explore what remained of apartments. There was no one around and she felt conflicted about being inside homes where beds remained unmade, dishes were left on tables and there were family photographs of people she didn’t know. She wondered about their well-being and continues to struggle with her own emotions as she tries to document a conflict that has upended the lives of so many in her country.

But she knows creating and sharing her work is a way to tell a story that others may not otherwise realize, despite a world in which images can be shared internationally seconds after they have been produced. 

“I hope my pictures are powerful but it’s not necessarily only about my pictures but the power of photography,” said Sidash, who wears a silver necklace with a pendant in the shape of Ukraine. “It’s the best of what I can do in this life. I want to be useful and do something for my country. I couldn’t stay aside. Photography is this tool that helps me do something.”