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 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 be transformed?
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 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 be transformed?