Love + Salt: installation August 2022 – November 2022

Supported by Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) Love + Salt is an installation of cement paintings inspired by my family’s refugee story. The installation is a public art installation is in the garden at Brookline Arts Center. To learn more about this project please visit www.lovetosalt.com 

My family’s story is one of transformation. My grandfather had a celebrated fabric shop in the central market in Baghdad, but after fleeing with his family to Israel in the 1950’s, due to religious persecution, he eventually established a construction business building apartments. Fleeing his homeland of endless generations let to his medium transformation, from silks to cement.

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Ziv: installation December 2017- January 2018

Commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Ziv (splendor in Hebrew). Ziv evokes designs from ancient ceramic oil lamps, highlighting the earthly, yet supernatural miracle of one day’s quantity of oil lasting eight full days.

Made from garnica plywood, acrylic paint and light bulbs. James McClurkin, from CNC Furniture Factory, assisted with the menorah’s fabrication.

Love Like Salt // Performance

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston June 10th, 2017

Love like Salt

is a performance that reveals the skins of identity — constructed, imagined, and historically informed. A wall, wrapped with 200 feet of large drawings, collagraphs and woodblock prints, patiently waits its undressing. Prints of lace, jeans, tools, and wild mint are temporal materiality of my identity and heritage. I dislodge the myth of one language and one face, as I rip through the layers. This subtractive process tears through the strata of images and memory to the heart of language, that reveals the alchemy of my identity and my narrative through Baghdadi Jewish Arabic phrases.

“love like salt” is part of a larger field of research: Trespass Daughter

Trespass Daughter is the visualization of daughters reaching into history—pulling out erased memories and identities into visual fields of color and paint. What does it mean to be aware of oneself partially? Seeing ones identity in a partial context, throws the body into question. “Like where are you from … no really, where are you really and fully from!” This is part of my enduring interest in representation of the identified female form. Through paintings, drawings and installations, I hope to speak through the role as a daughter, shattering the images and narratives of containment.

Earth’s Touch

 Earth’s Touch, a mural size painting, is cataclysm pollinated with a romantic vignetted face. The face could be from a billboard, a fashion advertisement, or an 18th century portrait painting. The passage with the face looks like ripped paper, employed by “urban trickery” or trompe l’oeil. The ground, or substrate space of the canvas, is a stark contrast to the delicately painted face. The open space of the painting is stained and aggressively treated, as to reference earthiness and decay.

The Country Between Us