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Title - (Mis)folding

Blurb - My SIP work deals with a family of diseases called proteinopathies, or proteopathies, in which proteins fold incorrectly, often clustering in irregular patterns and causing serious consequences. In representing these through fashion, I aim to combine my background in biology and fascination with garment construction to foster curiosity and education for these complex conditions.

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I am interested in the visually compelling aspects of biology; specifically microscopic tissue staining and protein structure. Proteins perform a wide variety of important functions in the body and are formed by chains of amino acids. These chains then fold into intricate, three-dimensional structures. My work deals with a family of diseases called proteinopathies, or proteopathies, in which proteins fold incorrectly, often clustering in irregular patterns and causing serious consequences. This work also draws heavily on histological images created by taking thin sections of tissue and staining them with different chemical reagents to be able to clearly visualize typically transparent cells. To create these pieces, I draft patterns and construct familiar garments, then modify them as a means of transformation by adding elements or taking them away. I often work with transparent materials to either obscure or make visible interior structures. In representing proteinopathies through fashion, I aim to combine my background in biology and fascination with garment construction to foster curiosity and education for these complex conditions.

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I am interested in revitalizing “forgotten” found objects—objects that are usually designated as clutter—by transforming their visual elements in abstract painting. My work is process-oriented; each painting is formally and intuitively driven, playfully exploring how color, shape, and texture interact. The objects I use as source material are then placed into a new imaginative context that is meaningful to me. Spread across multiple canvases with sections of wall color, my work opens different possibilities as to how I can continue to expand and rework, or literally rehang, my abstractions—the current installation need not be fixed. I think of my finished pieces as new objects transformed from the original “forgotten” items, occupying a sense of belonging when fit into the installation space. Things, Transformed thus reflects my own visual appreciation of the material world.

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Title: Things, Transformed

Blurb: I am interested in revitalizing “forgotten” found objects—objects that are usually designated as clutter—by transforming their visual elements in abstract painting, a process that places the objects in a new imaginative context that is meaningful to me. My work is formally and intuitively driven, playfully exploring how color, shape, and texture interact.

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Sometimes words fail us. In my work, I strive to communicate those things that are too difficult to word, or too painful to say. Each painting is a particular feeling or a particular moment in time where I felt like I could not express it properly to anyone. My art has always been a way for me to process life when it feels too heavy, too intense. Moments of ecstatic joy, longer periods of deep depression and everything in between is memorialized here. Each work comes from a singular burst of creative motion, painted in one swift stroke. Rarely do I come back to a piece after I feel that the feeling has been satiated. However specific these feelings may be to me, I believe that you will see yourself in them as well. No man is an island and no feeling exists in a void. No matter what I was thinking when I painted a singular piece, you are free to interpret and keep that feeling for yourself.

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Title: Dum Spiro Spero

Blurb: In my work, I strive to communicate those things that are too difficult to word, or too painful to say. Each painting is a particular feeling or a particular moment in time where I felt like I could not express it properly to anyone. My art has always been a way for me to process life when it feels too heavy, too intense. Moments of ecstatic joy, longer periods of deep depression and everything in between is memorialized here.

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Through my work, I explore American urban and suburban spaces under the concept of liminality while focusing on the interplay of formal photographic elements.

Liminal refers to transitory periods, the space located between things physically, emotionally, and mentally. It is the space between no longer and not yet. It challenges our perceptions of mundaneness and invites us to reconsider what we already know.

My work approaches the concept of liminality like a puzzle. The locales I have chosen to document are caught in transit, devoid of human interactions; they are fragmented, yet each photo suggests a greater story behind it. They invite the viewer to confront their own thoughts and feelings about where they are situated and what they are experiencing.

For me, these spaces evoke feelings of familiarity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and nostalgia. Exploring these spaces relieves my desire to find meaning from uncertainty and soothes my curiosity about where I am situated within the world.

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Title: The Liminal Space

Blurb: Through my work, I aim to explore American urban and suburban spaces under the concept of liminality while focusing on the interplay of formal photographic elements. Exploring these spaces relieves my desire to find meaning from uncertainty and soothes my curiosity about where I am situated within the world.

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Title: Wonderous World

Blurb: In my works, I am exploring and reliving former memories of mine. In the process of reliving, I often experience the feeling of nostalgia that I aim to create through dream-like and otherworldly landscapes of my memories.

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Over the course of the year, I have been exploring and reliving various memories. Through reliving these memories, I often experience nostalgia, which I would describe to be a magical feeling or sensation. A yearning for a time that has come and past, that will never be the same. This feeling has manifested into my works to create dream-like landscapes that contain both real elements of our world, yet a place very different from it. Articulating the distance between what was real from my memories of these places and the feelings I had experienced. While my worlds appear magical and unrealistic, they contains the aspects I remember most vividly such as various flowers and foliage. To the viewer these landscapes may seem otherworldly, but to me they are real fragments of my memories and imagination. When I look at these spaces I can not help but to relive their memories again and again.

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I am interested in reimagining the mundane as tangible, fantastical beings. Utilizing ceramic clay underglaze, and everyday materials I am able to transform doodles into animated sculptures with individual personalities. Transferring the medium from drawings to sculptures allows people to observe and physically look at these characters, similar to having an interaction with an actual human; instead of gazing upon fantastical cartoons, audiences are directly faced with the otherworldly. I believe through integrating illustrations into sculptures, we can bring stories to life in a way that is ephemeral yet everlasting—animated sculptures stuck in a singular moment of time. Through different settings and contexts, there are different stories to be told through my world; the intricacies of young adulthood, relationships, and becoming an individual are common experiences being performed by uncommon beings. Ultimately, manifesting these creatures into existence provides comfort to myself going through life, and hopefully the viewer as well.

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I am interested in reimagining the mundane as tangible, fantastical beings. Utilizing ceramic clay underglaze, and everyday materials I am able to transform doodles into animated sculptures with individual personalities.

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I created a space filled with reflections of my personal growth throughout the last few years. In each sculpture I aimed to capture different learning moments within my life as a way to not forget the difficulties of life and how I grew. I tried to express my passion for glassblowing by not only using glass, but by incorporating different materials and strategies that relate to aspects of glassblowing. I also focused on using extra plaster scraps and other recycled materials within my sculptures due to how wasteful they can be. I created this space in hope that others would be able to find a part of themselves within one of my pieces.

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Title –whimvisible

Blurb – My SIP work focuses on my own experiences with disability and queerness, as I believe drawing from my own life creates my most meaningful art. Through whimsical and colorful characters, I aim to make two marginalized and often overlooked identities hyper-visible, challenging what subject matters and artistic styles should be taken seriously in the mainstream art world. With this exhibition, my hope is to bring accessibility and joy to the forefront.

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Through my work, I aim to process and articulate my experiences of disability and queerness – while still holding true to my love of silliness!

The themes of whimsy and visibility are intentional in these artworks. Both queer and disabled identities can present as invisible to others, causing their validity to be challenged, and their accompanying struggles and joys to be ignored. As this exists in my own life, I use my perspective with queerness, autism, and chronic illness to inform my work. By creating a collection of whimsical and silly characters made through multiple types of mediums, I can make two marginalized identities hyper-visible in many ways without centering my own image. The art can hold my experiences for me, with humor and with honesty. By approaching a heavy topic in this manner, I wish to challenge what subject matters and artistic styles should be taken seriously in the mainstream art world, and hopefully bring accessibility to the forefront.

Most importantly, I do this work because I believe this type of creation – artmaking for connection to oneself and to others – is a radical thing to do.

I hope my art brings you joy.

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When I create art, it is a reflection upon myself. A way to translate the highs and lows of feelings, to create a remnant of the emotions and thoughts I form. My art is very personal, so I draw upon imagery that is present around me, buildings, patterns, nature, and human forms. In doing so I am exploring the fragmentation of objects as memories and places that make up the context of my life. In these combined and broken elements, I want to capture the ever-changing emotional breadth of my human experience.

I gravitate towards representing my life and emotions by the imagery around me and arrange them into “still lifes.” These still lifes, may seem random, but they collections images, moments, emotions, and times into a symbolic form of my experience. In so the mixed media is also representational of the shaping of my experience, and I use a variety of art forms to achieve this. Photography, drawing, linocut, printmaking, xerox transfer to name a few. These create repeating patterns and motifs that move within and outside my world.  These art forms are resources to collage together memories and fragments to capture a moment. These unrelated memories will create a composition to explore the temporal.

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Title: mid-thought.

Blurb: Through a variety of mediums, I am exploring the fragmentation of objects as memories and places that make up the context of my life. In these combined and broken elements, I want to capture the ever-changing emotional breadth of my human experience.

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Title - mind the reflection: إسمي فلسطين

Blurb - My SIP is about juxtaposition ideas about the human experience and takes a conceptual approach.

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My SIP a labor of love and self reflection. Thought provocation through the juxtaposition of material and ideas is the main emphasis of my work. I focus mainly on ideas of South West Asian North African identity and capitalism. The project takes a conceptual route and brings ideas together in ways that do not in exist in the day to day for most people in the West. I challenge every viewer to think of their own perception when looking at the works.

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Dum Spiro Spero is a mantra that I have often repeated to myself in these last few months. In Latin, in translates to “While I breathe, I hope”. I am a person prone to melodrama and I often get caught up in my own head. The mantra helps me return to the moment and stop me from spinning out, so to speak. Painting does the same thing. I walk into the studio, assess the moment I am in, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and I begin to paint. There is very little romance in it, though I wish I could tell you it is some magical healing experience. It is simply a way to cope, to let it all out, to celebrate, and to mourn. I don’t have a reason for why I feel so strongly about sharing this with you. I simply want you to know. I don’t wish to be cliché, but moments are the reason for living. The more you can have and experience with yourself and others, the more peaceful it all feels, smaller and bigger all at once. While I breathe, I hope for this moment and the next. I hope for peace, deep connections, kindness, righteous anger, cathartic sadness. There is something quite beautiful to all of it. And I wanted you to know.

DUM SPIRO SPERO

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Title: Queering Out The House

Blurb: By expanding the facets of furniture and interior design as a whole, my work seeks to deconstruct hegemonic structures that are enabled by built environments. In using the narrative qualities of fabric and quilts specifically, I aim to embrace queer life within the domestic space, utilizing its physicality as a device to explore and celebrate queerness as an identity, a feeling, and as a lifestyle.

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By expanding the facets of furniture and interior design through combining bright colors and protruding forms, my work aims to celebrate sexuality, gender identity, and queerness more broadly within the domestic space.

My works seek to portray my own understanding of queerness, as something that encapsulates sexual orientation and gender identity but also extends into a way of thinking, of living, of loving. I use interior design as a device to embrace the often deemed “inappropriate” or “embarrassing” parts of identities and bodies alike. The main stylistic themes of my work include age-old narrative artforms such as patchworking, weaving, and quilting, which in my work represent how creative queer people are especially when finding their chosen family or altering clothing to fit who they are.

I aim to emphasize that our environments are malleable active agents within our lives. They can be created to oppress or to uplift. My work embraces curiosity and exploration of the self, taking the power away from the shame and guilt.

It's time for spring cleaning, so let’s queer out the house.