ARTIST STATEMENT

With this body of work, I am attempting ancestry alchemy. My goal is to transform the experiences and pain of my female ancestors into power and strength. Power and strength that in turn I and my female audience may draw upon today. I am attempting to reveal the nobility and humanity of those who we have all been trained to see as property - women. Covered women, prostitutes, girl-children, wives, and so forth.

I explore this question by making simple yet uncanny interventions into found imagery. By working with iconographic 19th century Qajar era Persian studio photographs,  Persian miniatures, and a vibrant, neon palette of oil pastels and embroidery thread, I create mystical images that draw nobility and power out of their female characters, while obstructing, binding, and softening the male ones. Closing off the male figures and opening up the channels of expression in the female ones.

By holding up this mirror I am trying to free the women in the images by seeing them in a new way.  I want my audience to feel pride in the subjects and feel the subjects’ pride. 

I also want to answer this question for myself. How long are we going to keep seeing ourselves the way that they see us?

In conjunction with this body of visual work, I also am working on a body of poems about my female ancestors and their experiences.