FOUR brings together the work of artists Reem Bassous (Lecturer), Pratisha Budhiraja, Deborah G. Nehmad (MFA alum), and Yida Wang (alum and former faculty) to explore how different aspects of culture collectively build into an identity. Using ancient motifs, such as Islamic symbols, and customary genres, such as landscape painting, each artist incorporates iconic elements of production specific to her identity or culture as a way to analyze social circumstances and question the foundations upon which contemporary interpretations are based. In each case, the artist uses personal experience as her starting point for social critique.
Yida Wang’s unconventional application of nontraditional media and substrates in her reinterpretation of the classical Chinese landscape investigates the transformative process spurred by contemporary global cross-fertilization. Deborah G. Nehmad relies on the traditional “craft” of needlepoint to incorporate a contemporary commercial symbol to critique passivity in the face of ignorance and injustice. Pratisha Budhiraja’s interest in philosophy and culture, combined with her training in biology and the social sciences, form a basis for her visual experiments. Her current installation is a symbiotic arrangement of human and nature. Reem Bassous examines the political dynamics in the Arab world based on her memories growing up during the Lebanese civil war, asserting the grid among conflicting religious symbols and aggressive passages of graphite and paint in her attempt to impose order where there is chaos.
Similarities among the artists’ work will be evident in their shared emphasis on process. Distinctions among the artists’ work are apparent in their unique approaches to grappling with cultural markers of their own identity.
FOUR opens on Thursday, January 14, 2016 at the KOA Art Gallery on the Kapiolani Community College campus and runs through February 10, 2016.
For further information, contact Deborah G. Nehmad at 808-542-5779.