One of the goals of the Alberta Society of Artists (ASA) is to work closely with emerging young artists in the province. The ASA offers educational opportunities to student artists in the form of annual scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students. Students have the opportunity to help with exhibitions management in Edmonton, Calgary and around the province as the ASA offers hands-on experience for students to expand their art education outside of the classroom!
I am a contemporary expressionist painter working in various media but mostly in oil. My work uses a wide variety of styles and impulses of painterly language to explore the space and visual experiences of painting. Through my art practice, I deconstruct and reinterpret my life experiences and life interests from photographs, memory and imagination, to build bold and intriguing paintings that resonate with emotional and atmospheric narratives and embrace the complexities of our human experience.
This current body of work looks at the dichotomy between strength and weakness within ourselves and the unease that manifests when our vulnerabilities are laid bare through heightened uncertainty. Now, in the light of a global pandemic, when our social and cultural structures have been so deeply shaken, how do we grow, repair, rebuild? How do were define purpose and meaning when we are living through an ongoing state of crisis?
I have been interested in exploring that place of disquiet we go to as humans where we sit with the familiar trespasser of unwanted thoughts, to face our personal demons, self-doubts and irrational fears. In particular, I have been looking at the blurry space where mending takes place when we yield to thoughts of darkness and surrender to our imperfect mind and let light in. I see this mysterious internal space as a necessary and very human place for repair and growth.
I am building storied, other-worldly environments that reflect these feelings of disquiet; narratives permeated with visual fragments of the familiar, of memory, of dreams and of fantasy. Into this world of disparate elements, feminine character/s are immersed, ambiguously falling, floating, rising or simply suspended or frozen, in a backdrop that feels both chaotic and serene at the same time.
This work is a collaboration between Danny, Hesam and Twinkle as a result of their conversations surrounding their identities, backgrounds and how individual perspectives shape their view on this particular element of life. Water and the query of its nature has always been a fundamental aspect from which philosophy has sprung. By examining the various states that one can find water in, we are able to relate and think inwardly to the tempests and stagnation found in our day-to-day moments leading to how our cultures are shaped.
Our aim was to juxtaposition the universality of water against the backdrop of our own individual ethnic backgrounds and identities.