Statement

I have been working steadily as a painter for more than ten years, and am currently studying for my MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. My path to becoming an artist has included the practice of law, environmental non-profit work, and a career teaching pilates and Gyrotonic®. Each has contributed to my development: the discipline to maintain a daily studio practice, the ability to conceive and communicate a message; an eye for balance in a composition; and a tactile awareness and ability to construct and deconstruct movement all inform my approach to a work surface.

Concepts of refuge and belonging as antidotes to a sense of displacement and otherness are both shadow and intentional themes in my work.  I have also begun exploring different elements of time and space and how they relate to the concept of entanglements: physical, emotional, quantum. I am in the lineage of a diaspora: my Armenian grandparents survived two waves of genocide before fleeing to Iraq, with my father eventually settling them in the US. I came of age struggling with a sense of fractured identity and anxiety amidst family secrets and unspoken tragedies, likely the products of generational trauma. From a young age I created my own refuge by being in the woods and found a sense of self in music and in art. I was always drawing and was obsessed with calligraphy. I am only now unwinding how this is being expressed in my life and in my art.

My focus has turned from painting and collage into constructing dimensional pieces from non-traditional materials: steel wire, metal,  handmade paper and thread.  I'm drawn to the contradictions and juxtapositions of solid and fluid, rigid and pliable, hard lines and ragged edges.  I like surfaces that look like they've seen some things, and now hold history and meaning.