Artist's Statement​

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My art comes from my thrownness: my birthplace in Soviet Armenia, my family’s unusual journeys of immigration and emigration, a love of the humanities, and my reverence of nature and my wonder of the cosmos. I select subject matter with an intuitive pull, perhaps in search of spiritual fulfillment. My art speaks of the human condition and reoccurring themes of life’s uncertainties and bewilderments. Using symbolic and incongruous imagery, I construct and deconstruct the cultural and social consequences of migration and displacement of people over time. I depict segmented aspects of the displaced “body,” fragmented geographically and culturally by trauma, politics, social disparities, idealism, and sentimentality. I am drawn to the flatness of the canvas as well as film, not willing to show necessarily imply formal depth but to unify symbolically on a single plane. Picture plane layering offers the setting, where I merge iconic or traditional imagery and cultural symbols to convey the exploits of misguided societal dogma upon the unassuming “other”. My mixed media paintings (acrylic, pencil, crayon, charcoal, spray paint, photo transfers), and experimental photographs and films are devised to reflect the fragmented, unfinished, effaced, and worn, from such subtleties as imperfect lines and shapes, to scrapping, tearing, and defacement. Processes used upon a given imagery to depict lives deceived, manipulated, shattered and lost. As well, I use symbolic imagery and motifs found in pagan artifacts, and traditional signs in medieval and renaissance art to show spheres of the spirit.