Artist Statement: Sinejan Kılıç Buchina has for the last several years been exhaustively working on a series focused on time, material growth and social diaspora.
Are you planning on submitting to So to Speak’s annual contest for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art? If not, you should be! Our staff
The veil of ignorance can prevent us from knowing who we are. But we owe it to ourselves to explore our potential and seize our
Girardi explores the visual and social subjects of the bar through drawings done on site and photographs taken from nights out, happy hours, or simply among the gathering of friends at local bars. Through these drawings, Girardi attempts to mimic and recollect setting, sound, blocks of color, and interaction of the aesthetics surrounding these memories created through the social habits of today’s young urban population.
While not every show will be for or about women or “women’s issues” or for or about diversity and diverse expression, Olly Olly shows are more likely than most in Northern Virginia to include art that represents varied perspectives, a wide variety of cultures, a wide variety of mediums, and a multiplicity of backgrounds and experiences. We think that this diversity results in better shows, in better conversations, and ultimately in the creation of a better art scene and a better community.
My work is often concerned with the everyday, calling to mind the familiar artifacts and ephemera of the mundane and reimagining and transforming them into fantastical dreamlike elements of magical worlds that are just below, above, or somehow beyond our reach. I’m continuously building an ongoing narrative exploring the concept of being a stranger in a strange land. I put myself or a persona or avatar of myself into a variety of situations and environments in order to play with or question a variety of assumptions about embodiment, decolonization, race, sexuality, gender, identity, space, and place.
JCR: It’s really important for me to work not just with Feminist ideas, but within the structure of the arts community and art ecology. In DC I’m super lucky to be able to work almost exclusively with other people who also identify as women, non-binary, and queer people. I’m very very lucky I think. It’s not “cool” in this century to be militant, but I’m pretty militant—if I know a gallery is showing 80% cis male white men, I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to work with them. I’m trying to figure out professionally when or if it’s worth it to make those compromises.
Washington DC area artists were invited to consider how they negotiate the use of household space with their children. The work in the show investigates physical and emotional spaces that are separate, shared or disputed. By representing the constant evolution of personal boundaries in specific parent/child relationships, the exhibit highlights topics that are publicly debated but only privately encountered.
I work with domestic settings and distorted figuration, and the characters in my photographs transform themselves using basic materials including purses, pillows and their own
This body of work will continue, as a collection of textile texts, to write its own meaning. It seems I will always be learning this language.
