Artist Statement
We are looking at people commuting, shopping, sightseeing, posing for a photograph, their respective roles emphasized by the observer. Hypersensitive to the time and place, the architecture and the light reflect back your feelings about the scene, making the walls between feeling nostalgia and romanticizing imperialism thin. In this work, I use digitized slides and photographs my father took in Central Asia in the early 90’s. I reinterpret these images to create a shift from the vernacular into poetic.
As a woman who grew up in an extended family practicing Islam, I hold the constant pressure of grief and the desire for understanding. There is an urgency to build recognition and make relational artwork to stop the erasure, caricature, commodification, and the loss of life and dignity.
Each work begins with a source photograph. I zoom in and make choices about the position of people, the level of detail, the clothing and the objects in people’s hands: grocery bags, scarves, umbrellas, cameras. The tags on the buildings, vehicles, bicycles, and open doors become the expression of the tenderness to see beyond judgment.
I would like to highlight the textile piece, Sisters, an 8 foot blue polyester hanging with two red columns stitched on one side of fabric. I grouped this work together with the three paintings and installed it hanging on a flag pole out from the wall, a gray-blue triangle is painted next to the piece to mimic the illusion of a shadow. The paintings and the textile act together to blend the real, the perceived, and the interpreted. What is it like to piece together a world populated with the energy of life, rest, and pleasure? What side do you stand on to see or to conceal?
Reflecting on the words by Suzani Samarqndi inscribed on the mihrab in Derbent “I have brought four things, O Lord (Kings), which are not in your treasure, you are not, I have brought needs, excuses, and sins.” Persian lyric poetry in general incorporates and welcomes the pre-Islamic past suggesting a perspective that there is not an absolute view. The implication is that there is not one sole Truth applicable at all times to all people; that other ways of being can be considered to be equally valid. Pushing back against Orientalist fascinations with people and places, these paintings reveal enough to stir assumptions and pull the viewer right back to reexamine their position.
Leyla Rzayeva
11/19/2024