She has since worked with partners that include the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum and UCSD’s Kamil Art Gallery. She currently resides in Orange County, CA where she practices her art from her home studio.

Artist Statement

My practice is poetic exploration of a way of life. It resembles an archeological process of digging and searching into my roots to come to a better understanding of self in a ritual act of painting and drawing. For me, it is an act of survival and meditation to discover another dimension of life. My inspiration comes from poetic verses about life and love and expands through my own cultural heritage, customs, and language. By utilizing Assyrian alphabets in my compositions, I aim to reintroduce the aesthetic values of a language in creating calligraphic compositions and patterns. On background of my calligraphic compositions, I utilize wash and drip effect to portray history and aging language. In contrast, bright and vibrant alphabets to represent my hope for its survival.

and large scale paintings that use family folklore as the basis for understanding mixed ethnicity, and more broadly, the question of identity. How do you mourn a culture you never knew? How do you celebrate it?

Artist Statement

The trauma of past relatives re-explored and retold by a new generation. You feel the effects of the diaspora, being the grandchild of refugees. Removed, yet hungry to know why you are the way that you are. Why the family culture functions the way that it does. Searching for the answers that will finally put you at ease — continually following that siren’s song of a disappeared nation. Esther’s work re-explores the trauma of past relatives and retells their stories for a new generation. 

working on ceramic and sculpture pieces at the Harry S Truman College of Chicago. Art captured Rabel at age 10 when he began drawing. He drifted into digital art and an art award received in his senior year of high school gave him the boost he needed to pursue art in college. Working on several art design projects while in university led to a career in graphic design. He currently resides in Chicago, IL where he practices his art from his home studio.

Artist Statement

The link between ancestral heritage and the land is a key component of Assyrian art and culture. The land has preserved us and it continues to connect us to our roots. The Unadorned series gives life to landscape art by using satellite photography of Assyrian lands. Instead of a literal depiction of mountains, valleys, and streams, this series distills ancient Assyrian art to line, shape, texture, and color as the foundation for pictorial landscape imagery. It searches for novel, intriguing compositions from a bird’s eye view. Images of the land are sown with compositional elements taken from ancient Assyrian reliefs and reimagined as aerial landscapes, filled with colors and shapes that are familiar, yet new. The title of each piece refers to the types of permanent and temporary inhabitants who have lived in these lands over time.

inspired by western kitsch and Middle Eastern mythology particular to Mesopotamia. She has exhibited at R/SF Projects (San Francisco, CA), Brilliant Champions Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), CTRL SHFT collective (Oakland, CA) and Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA). She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017, and is currently an AICAD Fellow in the Ceramics Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Artist Statement

I spent my early years surrounded by my mother’s artwork. From folkloric paintings that romanticized Middle Eastern culture, to sitting enthralled as she created elaborate floral bouquets from homemade sculptural materials she baked in our kitchen’s oven. My mother filled our home with examples of beauty and resourcefulness at a time in which her geographic and cultural position imposed strict social and economic limitations on any creative endeavor. Her perseverance and strength is a point of inspiration for me as I weave through diasporic shifts in the cultures that I now inhabit. The inspiration I find from the women in my life, and others like the Pan Arab pop stars of my childhood and the ancient female characters of Mesopotamian history has conflated time, aesthetic sensibilities and materials within my practice.

Clay has unsurprisingly become my primary material as it effortlessly speaks both to ancient Mesopotamian cultures and the lineages of great Bay Area clay artists that have inspired my practice and shaped our contemporary concept of the medium. Combining the irreverent gesturality of the Funk Art movement with the myth and artifacts of ancient Iraq, my work roots me within a diasporic sense of place, expanding on the work of my mother and the various cultures that have shaped me.

MA in transdisciplinary studies at the University of Arts in Zurich. Most of her practice centralizes untold stories or views and leads back to the longing for understanding of various social dynamics.

Artist Statement

The interpretation of a tree of life is linked to birth and death and evolution and comfort and persistence and reproduction. All of these essential elements of life are connected to embedded rituals in society and culture. Throughout history, human cultures use rituals as the physical and psychological means for dealing with the unpredictability of the natural, social, and cosmic realms and in order to bring it into alignment with group values. The project is based on two layers: the physical installation as a first step, made out of mixed materials, the elements, shapes and details linked to home decor. The second step was the depiction of the work in four different ways.

abstract expressionism, and contemporary surrealism. Her work has been exhibited within the Assyrian community as well as statewide events. Larsa enjoys playing with materials that connect her to her culture and heritage.

Artist Statement

Having a rich ancestral and cultural background serves as an endless generator for ideas and development of identity. This body of work attempts to discover the self, to search for truth, and acquire a depth of understanding. By using processes such as fermentation, and mediums such as wine, fruit, milk, blood, saliva, and ink, the work explores unusual mediums and materials which live and deteriorate with the subject.  Larsa visually translates her ideas of community, relationships, and fragments of family memories. She relies on her instincts and connects these to her sensory perception as she experiments in her chosen mediums. The development of self, as well as the recovery of self, are underlying themes in Larsa’s artwork as she gradually pieces together who she is, who she was, and who she will be.