••• Statement

My paintings explore the experience of real/unreal bodies and identities.  How do we conceive of our bodies in relation to our realities, histories, memories, relations, and dreams?  With life-size figures, my artwork depicts the self synthesizing with conscious/unconscious embodiment.  I imagine the body caught in transition—fluid, multiplying, in tension with itself, and fused in between states of being, as it negotiates conflicts of internal and external desires. The result is often a sexualized unity of existential wonder and subjectivity marked onto the flesh, surfacing beautiful blemishes and hybrid abstractions of the body.

My fantastical imaginations of the human figure are inspired by my diasporic Armenian Canadian identity and cultural history of genocide.  In addition, I turn to images of the body arrested in space and motion, anatomical diagrams, in between states of being, and forms of shape-shifting found in science fiction and indigenous folklore.  Using bold, negative colours, my technique combines sharp, illustrative brushwork with cloudy layers of dry brush to express linear mappings of the body.

In some ways, these representations are like energy portraits—visual conceptions of mind/body auras.  In other ways, they are paradoxical images: articulations of what is inarticulate about the body, while the self/other is held in alternative, lucid states of metamorphosis and mutation.