My practice is intrinsically linked to my life experiences, yet it opens a space in which to recast memories and process the paradoxes of my childhood in Tehran, and to ground my perspective as an Iranian now living in the US. Born soon after the Islamic Revolution, I witnessed my country’s transformation from a Western-friendly monarchy into a suppressive theocratic republic. My paintings describe the double life I have always led, adhering to Islamic law in public while thinking and acting freely in private.

The timelessness of nature reveals that it contains the history of countless lives that have come and gone, leaving behind thousands of dramas. I’m interested in the spiritual bonds between humans and their ancestral lands and nature’s generosity, rigor, and freedom. I’m imagining that these figures embody this spirit of nature in my work.

The imaginary landscapes come from places I have actually visited or those I have seen in my dreams. It is a rearrangement of accumulated memories and imaginings, recalling their atmospheres as something that remains in our shared unconscious.

My practice explores the identity of the in-between, the overlap in the Venn diagram of two cultures. As a Romanian-born, US-raised artist, I want to preserve and broadcast links to the cultures of my upbringing and birthplace. My understanding and experience of Romania has always been defined by my family. In the wake of my last grandparent’s death, the relationship becomes unclear. In my attempts to ground and define my own identity, I look to my parents and grandparents for cues on how they made a home for themselves wherever they went, reflecting their experiences with

Libby Rosa’s work blurs the distinction between abstraction and representation, causing cognitive dissonance. The painterly situations showcase the metamorphic nature of paint. Questioning where the representational motifs start and stop and where the painterly abstractions begin and end is central to how the work is visually experienced.

My current paintings respond to the lack of Asian American representation in portraiture within modern and contemporary Western art institutions. I question the idea of visibility, or invisibility—who is remembered in history, and who is forgotten. Believing that figurative work has the ability to empower one’s sense of self-worth, and with Asian Americans living in a society that rarely shows their faces in everyday media, I set out to paint these portraits as efforts to help a community feel like they belong to a greater social conversation.

I paint an alternative universe somewhere between dusk and dawn that is mysterious and melancholy via landscapes that are vacant, possibly dangerous, but peaceful.

When discussing Graham Chapman’s funeral, John Cleese talked about humor and seriousness, and argued that the two are not mutually exclusive. Seriousness, he said, is often confused with solemnity, which should be reserved for only the most dire situations, if for nothing at all. Humor is a tool that allows people to cope serious matters. Regardless of his current controversy, I still believe in Cleese’s sentiment.

I am a Chinese American woman painter from Southern California. My paintings derive from the traditional Chinese brush-painted calligraphic mark. Real or imagined text is written in cursive running script in oil paint on the canvas as an underpainting that defines the basic compositional structure. Then the writing disappears under the clothing of Western abstraction, applied in chunks with a palette knife, creating the “furry” texture that is characteristic of my work. The process erodes the linguistic function of the marks, mirroring the cultural loss that immigrant

In her poem “The Language of the Brag,” Sharon Olds lays down her brag of her fullest self “pushing the new person out.” One person making another. That’s what we do, pregnant or not. Olds claims her brag for this heroic, but mostly invisible, act that women perform. I began looking for other brag moments that may be overlooked, and I found them in the selfies of the people who inspired my painting series The New Brag. Like Olds, I am reclaiming the word “brag” and its definition of being “full of oneself” as a positive and necessary stance for myself and all

There is a sometimes imaginary, sometimes real amount of control in how we interpret or conceptualize our personal environments. This psychological condition and the ensuing lack or actualization of comfort it produces are the focus of my work. Comfort and discomfort guide a person through their days, lives, and weekly grocery store trips. Expectations conditioned by experience collide with the unpredictability of reality. The disruptive juxtapositions are numerous and when taken in stride inspire curiosity. Interpreting the now through the jarring