BIO
Sa’dia Rehman (b. Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how contemporary and historical images—in public and private records—communicate, consolidate and contest ideas about race, power and gender. Through performance, video, installation and large-scale wall drawing, Rehman obsessively pulls apart and puts together “images of consumption”— family photographs, mass media and art historical images. In addition to her archive, her core materials include hand-cut stencils, Xeroxes, charcoal, graphite, erasers, spray paint and ink.
Rehman has shared her work nationally and internationally at venues such as Twelve Gates Gallery (2019), The Kitchen (2018), Aicon (2018), Center for Book Arts (2015), Local Projects (2015), Los Angeles Sony Theater (2015), Taubman Museum (2013), Queens Museum (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2010) and Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Islamabad (2006), among others. She was a nominee of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a recipient of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Grant (2018), Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship (2018) and Ann Hamilton Travel Grant (2016). She has been awarded residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation (2018), Byrdcliffe Woodstock (2018), Vermont Studio Center (2018), Rasquache Residency (2016), ASI/LMCC & Creative Capital (2011) and AIM Bronx Museum (2008). Her work has been featured in the NYTimes, Harper's, Art Papers and ColorLines. She received her MA from City College, CUNY (2006) and MFA from Ohio State University (2017). Recently, Rehman was nominated as a “Woman to Watch” by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC where she will exhibit her work in May 2020.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My art practice focuses on the relationship between printed images, text and the body: the individual body, the body politic, the family. I queer images from newspapers, the internet, family photographs and artwork reproductions. I am particularly interested in images that depict Muslims and other people of color. I dismantle, layer and resample these images into various configurations— document-sized and large-scale wall drawings, assemblages, performances. I bring attention to and raise questions about the fragmented and hybrid realities and possibilities that exist between yesterday and today. As I cut, copy, and reassemble images, texts, materials and marks, I enact the labor of undoing this world and building another.
I transform images into hand-cut stencils that are reminiscent of Islamicate patterns: floral, naturalistic, geometric. I use ink, paint, and graphite to transfer the motifs onto a surface—a wall, paper, fabric—again and again. In the wall drawing Azaadi (2019), I cut a stencil with the Urdu word for freedom, and rub graphite through the negative space to imprint the wall. My hand-cut stencils are simultaneously the tool and the artwork. I made a stencil from a family photograph to create the work This is my Family (2017). In Family (2017), the stencil becomes the artwork.
Stencils are guidelines. They are agents of repetition and accumulation. With the repeated pressure they break. I use stencils as a tool to work through my questions about the structures we inherit: How are images absorbed? How can they be erased? Can they can be transformed?
Image credit: Amna A. Akbar
Sa’dia Rehman (b. Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how contemporary and historical images—in public and private records—communicate, consolidate and contest ideas about race, power and gender. Through performance, video, installation and large-scale wall drawing, Rehman obsessively pulls apart and puts together “images of consumption”— family photographs, mass media and art historical images. In addition to her archive, her core materials include hand-cut stencils, Xeroxes, charcoal, graphite, erasers, spray paint and ink.
Rehman has shared her work nationally and internationally at venues such as Twelve Gates Gallery (2019), The Kitchen (2018), Aicon (2018), Center for Book Arts (2015), Local Projects (2015), Los Angeles Sony Theater (2015), Taubman Museum (2013), Queens Museum (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2010) and Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Islamabad (2006), among others. She was a nominee of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a recipient of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Grant (2018), Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship (2018) and Ann Hamilton Travel Grant (2016). She has been awarded residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation (2018), Byrdcliffe Woodstock (2018), Vermont Studio Center (2018), Rasquache Residency (2016), ASI/LMCC & Creative Capital (2011) and AIM Bronx Museum (2008). Her work has been featured in the NYTimes, Harper's, Art Papers and ColorLines. She received her MA from City College, CUNY (2006) and MFA from Ohio State University (2017). Recently, Rehman was nominated as a “Woman to Watch” by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC where she will exhibit her work in May 2020.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My art practice focuses on the relationship between printed images, text and the body: the individual body, the body politic, the family. I queer images from newspapers, the internet, family photographs and artwork reproductions. I am particularly interested in images that depict Muslims and other people of color. I dismantle, layer and resample these images into various configurations— document-sized and large-scale wall drawings, assemblages, performances. I bring attention to and raise questions about the fragmented and hybrid realities and possibilities that exist between yesterday and today. As I cut, copy, and reassemble images, texts, materials and marks, I enact the labor of undoing this world and building another.
I transform images into hand-cut stencils that are reminiscent of Islamicate patterns: floral, naturalistic, geometric. I use ink, paint, and graphite to transfer the motifs onto a surface—a wall, paper, fabric—again and again. In the wall drawing Azaadi (2019), I cut a stencil with the Urdu word for freedom, and rub graphite through the negative space to imprint the wall. My hand-cut stencils are simultaneously the tool and the artwork. I made a stencil from a family photograph to create the work This is my Family (2017). In Family (2017), the stencil becomes the artwork.
Stencils are guidelines. They are agents of repetition and accumulation. With the repeated pressure they break. I use stencils as a tool to work through my questions about the structures we inherit: How are images absorbed? How can they be erased? Can they can be transformed?
Image credit: Amna A. Akbar