[caption id="attachment_8296" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Sa’dia Rehman's Divine Guidance."][/caption]
Sa’dia Rehman and Gazelle Samizay's works were part of a two-person show held earlier this year at The Guild Art Gallery, titled “Metamorphosis”. The word metamorphosis implies a transformation; a change brought on by strong external and internal forces, sometimes working together in a natural way and at other times more dysfunctional and in opposition. Often times the later lends those outside and not undergoing this process, a state of discomfort. They find themselves provoked into interpretations and readings that question every sense of one's morality, virtue, right, and wrong.
Sa’dia Rehman and Gazelle Samizay put their viewers in such a state. Both artists live and work in America with cultural roots in Pakistan and Afganisthan respectively. Rehman was born in Queens, NY while Samizay was born in Afganisthan before her family moved to this country. While Rehmans work dwells within the psychy of a young girl, Samizay weaves a narrative of societal and cultural expectations of young women, in particular that of the institution of marriage. Rehman's work, which includes sculptural installations and watercolors, is also informed by social anxieties and religious expectations within the Pakistani American community. Samizay's videos and photographs explore the inter-junction between her Afghan roots and her American upbringing.
Rehman's installation My Sin, My Soul, My Tangle of Thorns is a wire and wood figure of a child made entirely of dark black hair. The hair shapes the countours of what seems to be a young girl of nine or 10 and is strewn on the ground around her. It seems to be falling from her body, shedding onto the floor, leaving her in the middle of an island that materialized from her own ejaculation (or is it the other way around, where this thick solid mass of hair, a quintessential mark of beauty for a woman in south Asian cultures, created her?). Pink flower petals are "arranged" around her face, framed by two pigtails, and the body of her “dress”. She wears black mary-janes and loose stockings, devoid of hands, she stands with her legs apart. She does not seem shy or introverted. In fact, there’s a strong sense of identity within this young person. The use of pink symbolizeing youth, child-like innocence, and purity, is re-structured in her other installation Divine Guidance. In it, four child-like figures without upper torsos hang upside down by their splayed legs, their pink layered skirt overturned creating a sense of nakedness even though they wear stockings. One figure reveals a suggestive tuft of hair placed on tinsel in the crotch area. It makes us cringe in its invitation and open display. Rehman deconstructs this innocence so cleverly. This is something that reverberates through her delicate watercolors on paper, as well, breaking down the formal and aesthetic structure thereby breaking personal historical structures.
Samizay's video and the accompanying photographs work within the same parameters. Upon my Daughter is a video that shows a young bride being prepared by a bunch of women’s hands as she lays down on a rich, red carpet. They apply her makeup and sew the delicate embroidery on her white wedding dress. Their movement starts slow then becomes a mad frenzy, as they eventually sew her entire body, as the girl struggles. The final image has a sense of tragic beauty to it. Its as if the details of bridal preparation is a metaphor of the building blocks of marriage, of what it is expected of women, as set forth by myths, rules, and laws of culture and country. We focus so much on these failing to realize how aggressive we get just to maintain law, forgetting the individual.
There is angst here and while the images thrown at us are unabashed, the tone that challenges our sense of propriety is a gesture of subtle strength more than some screaming, feminine rant. There’s no rage and anger here functioning as a facade of these two artists’ realities. There’s a depth to the narratives they weave. It comes perhaps from their own experiences but what art doesn't? It is worthwhile to step back from making the connection of personal histories within the work and really think about how it translates to this idea of breaking down of structures; the structures within society, relationships and our myriad personalities.
We all suffer (or maybe thrive) on multiple personalities. We exist in varied states of emotional and cerebral imagining of ourselves. We all have states of being some of which are dominant and those that we would rather not have everyone else see. It is brought on or conditioned into us as we live our lives, not just within a straight set of rules within one culture (usually based on who we are born to and where we are born), but when we get tossed around the constant alterations and mutations of this one system. This idea of being “genuine” about one’s quest against certain predetermined notions within the broad spectrum of human hierarchies, definitely echoes in Rehman's and Samizay's practice.
Gazelle Samizay's Upon My Daughter.
[caption id="attachment_8298" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Sa’dia Rehman's My Sin, My Soul, My Tangle of Thorns."][/caption]