Built by Pictures

Please enjoy spending time with these special works individually, accompanied by their artist statements and voice recordings.

Samin Ahmadzadeh

@samin_ahmadzadeh

I haven't forgotten (Khanoom) - Handwoven Photographs on Birch Plywood - 4.7x6.8 inches - 2017 - £450
Azam - Handwoven Photographs on Birch Plywood - 6.4x4.8 inches - 2018 - £350

My work is mainly based on weaving archival photographs together with a focus on the wider concepts of memory and cultural identity. I explore how memory of our experiences can contribute to our perceived identities. I apply the interwoven images to birch plywood surfaces that are then sanded and varnished, resulting in a three- dimensional object. Weaving has become synonymous with my practice, becoming a motif within my work. The process of physically manipulating the photographs allows me to explore the relationship between form, colour and surface to illustrate my ideas on memory. I attempt to describe the memories of people and the weavings are a pictorial description of the memory process. Photography for me is the documentation of who we are, what we do; a record of a moment in time. While the photographic medium is the starting point of my practice, I experiment with image manipulation to better illustrate my ideas concerning cross-cultural perspectives on identity.

Meredith Starr & Dayna Leavitt

@areyouthere_project

Are You There...It Looks Like You Went To Another World Today - c-print, 16x9", 2021, $1000

Are You There...I Wish I Walked Around - c-print, 16x9", 2021, $1000.

Are You There? is a transatlantic collaboration between former roommates Meredith Starr, an interdisciplinary artist in New York, and Dayna Leavitt, a photographer in London. Their conversations over text messages share their daily and mundane experiences and have become the source material for their project. The title of the series references the question they ask each other most, and the titles of the digital collages incorporate snippets of their conversations. Through the creation of their artwork, the artists navigate forced distance and a time difference. These manipulated photographs reflect a constructed family with memories blurred together to create a shared experience. Streams of light and moving shadows are often layered with their observations and invent an escapist, imagined space where the artists co-exist.

Tina Medina

@tinamedina_art

Little American Boy in the Orange Grove - paper, fabric, watercolor, gouache 8” x 8” 2021 $255

As a woman of Mexican indigenous ancestry born in the United States, I am compelled to make art that speaks about current issues by representing the point of view of immigrants and people of color. Part of the experience I portray is how we try to place ourselves within a historical context that was never meant to include us. My inspiration comes from cultural history and identity, including gender, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry, and class. Using found materials, sewing, fibers, and assemblage I explore juxtapositions of history with cultural symbols to reflect the narratives of those whose stories are left untold.

Hale Ekinci

@haleekinci_art

Duvet - Solvent photo transfer, acrylic, sequins, embroidery thread, crochet yarn, fringe, block print on found quilted bedsheets, 2021, 60”x80”, $5000

Collaging together fiber techniques, found textiles, and photographs from family archives, my work explores phases of acculturation, immigrant identity, and ideas about gendered labor. Decorative fringes are influenced by Turkish oya (lace edging on a headdress) and its use of symbolic patterns that serve as a secret language between women to express private, personal sentiments. Adopting these methods of embellishment and encoding, I create intercultural portraits framed with oya on floral bedsheets. The transferred images of people get repeated or turned into patterns themselves, to intertwine the “individual” into “collectives” that form multiple personalities. I then layer embroidery and painting to obscure their identities. The used domestic fabrics hold personal and bodily history invoking feelings of home and intimacy. By utilizing found materials and fiber crafts, I also question the value and worth assigned to materials and women’s work. The draped fabrics are framed with colorful crochet, where I crudely mimic traditional oya styles or devise new motifs like the “green card” edging reflecting my contemporary reality within the coding. Similarly, my use of Islamic ornamentation juxtaposed with portraiture is a subversive strategy. Seeming as mere beautification, ornamentation can actually trigger tension between the focal point and the motifs by teasing us in our vision’s periphery and overwhelm the figure it initially sets out to embellish. This echoes the different strategies of acculturation: integration, separation from, assimilation to, and social marginalization. Mimicking this ploy, the ornament, and the figure perpetually displace each other as the core of identity and the other.

McKenzie A. Floyd

@mcflofosho

Nature and Nurture - mixed media, 16x33, 2021, $750

"Nature and Nurture" is part of a series titled "Collaborations With Paul," which incorporates fabric cyanotypes printed with negatives taken by my grandfather in the 1930s. Although I knew him for much of my life (he lived till 101), I was not aware of his creative side until I discovered these negatives in late 2020. Many of the negatives I chose to use were failed experiments and mistakes - blurry subjects, over- or underexposed, even one clearly marked with Paul’s fingerprint. These human details make me feel closer to his artistic process, as if he is actively collaborating with me in the present. Each teabag is filled with lavender harvested from my parents’ farm in 2020, and the tags are printed with details from family documents and correspondence. "Nature and Nurture" represents the artistic genealogy that becomes infused in a family’s character over many generations.

Kamryn Shawron

@kamrynleelu

Heather's Birthday - paint, crayon and bead embroidery on photo, 8"X8", 2021, NFS

Halloween - paint, crayon and bead embroidery on photo,8"X8", 2021, NFS

Fibers is an all-encompassing textural medium, through my work it has always been approached that way. Incorporating different media to create new tactile surfaces. Whether through bead embroidery or thick dollops of paint, my aim is to enhance what is already visibly present in the materials. With an interest in both painting and photography, these practices are incorporated as embellishment techniques as well. Focusing on beadwork in excess, the audience is invited to enjoy, immediately and visually recognizing the transformation in the surface.

Taylor Yocom & Kate Yocom

@tayloryocom

Fire hydrant photo album - 1 - 4x6'' 2020 $100

Fire hydrant photo album - 2 - 4x6'' 2020 $100

When my twin sister and I were toddlers, we had an absolute obsession with...fire hydrants? So for our third birthday, my mom gave us an album of photos of fire hydrants around town that she spent weeks capturing. By documenting this photo album, I'm trying to pay homage to this beautiful gesture of the quirkiness of motherhood. Thanks, mom (Kate)!!

Christina Santner

@tinasantamo

Transparency Studies, Auntie with her Cousins - Inkjet prints on cotton and organza fabric, scans from medium format film, and photographs from my family’s archive. 29” x 23”, 2019, $600.
I Miss the Sound of Her Laugh - Cyanotype on cotton fabric, 25”x 23.5”, 2018, NFS.

These quilts are memorials to my late mother & grandmother are an exercise in remembering. The time spent constructing and reconstructing them has becomes a ritual that tethers me to the past, while reconstructs those memories into something tangible in the present. These works explore the fragile, unreliable, and impermanent nature of memory. This physical process of construction and revision becomes a metaphor for the function of memory itself - as it mimics the way in which our memories are reshaped to build the basis of our understanding of ourselves and our histories. These quilts ask: How do we continue our relationship with the departed? How do we mourn them? How do we embody and carry our memories of them in the present? In these transparency studies, multiple images from different moments in time are layered on top of one another, re-contextualizing each image and converging lived experiences with imagined ones. Layering images is a form of story-telling, and mimics the experience of building and revisiting memory. At their essence, memories are stories we tell ourselves, as each time a memory is revisited it is reconstructed by the mind. The images in these studies operate as memories of moments that live at half opacity in my mind, present, but not fully specified, finished, yet incomplete. Layering these images together mimics the way memories merge together in reconstruction, as this warping process creates images and memories that are entirely unique, and exist only as such in my mind. These studies explore this tension by reforming and complicating the original photographs, so that they might tell new stories.

Hannah Dean

www.hannahdean.co

Grandpa and David - Pencil and Acrylic on Stretched Canvas, 9x12 inches, 2019, $225

Halloween - Pencil, and Acrylic on Canvas Pad (Mounted and Framed in Blonde Wood), 11x14 inches, 2019, $275

Mostly I paint from photographic resources and memory: my own, and found images on Google search. The seemingly arbitrary nature of how images are paired in internet searches inspires my work, as well as issues of private vs. public life and performance through images.

Lauren Elena Lopez

@laurenelenastudio

I'll keep you safe and you'll keep me strong, we'll trade as we go - archival pigment print, 16 x 20 inches, 2021, $500

What does it look like, and how does it feel, when we remember? For me, it ranges from bright, sharp, and textured, to dark, cloudy, and muddled, with an inconceivable variety in between. Each memory feels different, a unique experience within my experiential terrain. This intangible nature of memory intricately connects with identity. The way we remember speaks to the core of who we are. I use myself as a case study, mining my personal archive of snapshots as a starting point, and expanding with narrative elements for a richer perspective. I investigate memory, seeking to express the ephemeral sensation of remembering in my work.