Selected Works
My writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, ArtPulse, Il Giornale dell'Arte, as well as other publications. I have been interviewed by Hetq (Armenia), cllr magazine (Canada), Damn (UK), and El Mundo (Spain). I have exhibited 17 shows on four continents. I am proudest of showing at the Modern Art Museum of Armenia.
I have an MFA in painting and make my daily bread through teaching art.
The life and work of Stephan Bagradian.
Using Franz Werfel’s 1933 book The FortyDays of Musa Dagh as a base text, I have reimagined a Middle East that did not experience the Armenian genocide. Stephan, in the original book, is killed at the age of 15. I play out the idea of him becoming an artist and flourishing in a Constantinople that retained its preeminence, supplementing New York as the 20th century’s art hub. I wrote an autobiography of Stephan and exhibit “his” paintings as a touring collection where I play the curator. When I first started this project, Turkish fascist organizations took note and used to send me threats. They seem to have moved on.
Ozymandias
500 metal plates engraved with the poem Ozymandias with a translation into Lingwa De Planta and installed on ruined building all over the globe.
A series of imagined Malaysian currency and banknotes based on aspects of Malaysian culture that I felt were underappreciated by a government that seemed more interested in what the rest of the world values. The stamps and currency were based on colonial Japanese and British designs and were reproduced with hand-washed cyanotype sun exposures with bamboo and green tea toning.
A Pantheon on the Moon
A proposal to build a 3-d printer on the moon to document every animal that goes extinct. This exhibit had schematic drawings and 50 painting of animals as proposed sculptures.
I make films sometimes. This one is related to the Ozymandias project above. I am working on a new one now that is about the wax dummies in the Hall of Man at the Natural Science Museum of New York and based on an article I wrote for the Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies.
Ararat from the West
Mt. Ararat is the sacred mountain of the Armenians. All paintings are from the east, where the modern-day state of Armenia is located. Before the genocide, most Armenians, including my grandfather, would have seen the mountain from the west. I have made a collection of paintings with this view, including a refigured copy, above e, of Martiros Sarian’s famous view from the east. These works are in progress. I hope to build a structure out of the paintings, facing inward/ viewable by a peephole and a flickering light to imitate the memory of a lost place.
Cigar Boxes. Started right before COVID, a series of cigar boxes with holes drilled in them and peepholes installed. When the viewer holds up their phone to use the flashlight function, an interior scene is releaved of animals that have been made extinct.
When my kid was three, she would tell these nutty jokes. For example, “A Moon….IS EATING A LEAF! hahahaha!” or “A goldfish… IS ON A TREE! haha” I guess A.I. would render this now, but back in 2020, all she had was me. I am thinking about pairing this set of 22 paintings with A.I.-generated versions of the same thing. Kind of a John Henry contest.
Dakar, Senegal Coud Paintings. I used to live in a half-built castle apartment on the ocean with my own turret. The only other occupant was the old French man who had designed the building and closed off half of it in honor of his deceased wife. I had a 360-degree view of the Atlantic, so I decided to paint the sunsets and clouds on my roof every night.