Trespass Daughter is the visualization of daughters reaching into history– bringing erased identities into visual fields of color and paint. Trespassing into patriarchal spaces, which they know they should not enter, has and continues to be essential for all women in our multicultural world. Through paintings, drawing and installation, I hope to speak towards the role as a daughter, shattering the images this role historically carries.

Recently, I have focused on the interaction of the psychosexual body with vibrant acts of censorship. As daughters, we are viewed, and therefore view ourselves, as trespassers from birth. In this context, trespassing is not an overt action but a state of being. To reconcile this state of being, we both censor ourselves and are censored by the world around us. Exposed, erased, obscured, the body rides in-between worlds. The body’s vessel carries sexuality in public space while it continues to intersect with the private space of mind and home. The Bodies are grounded in artifacts yet erased when faced with the whiplash of history. My family’s lost Iraqi history is illuminated and found in physical materials to reclaim voice.

The physicality of paint colliding with the body demands immediacy and urgency from the viewer. In some works, the figure is deep in a color field and the gesture of color appears to have been thrown or smeared onto a screen. The gestures act as an ideogram, both a composite of an idea and a will. In addition, the work expresses color as an event, similar to color experiences of a flicker of warm sunlight through soft rhythmic leaves.

Remains of Value : oil on linen : 60″ x 48″: 2016