Fictions, Frictions
September 1st - Oct 27th, 2017
Reception - Saturday, September 16th 5 to 9pm
Dahlia Elsayed’s first show with Virago Gallery features works on paper on the theme of language, landscape, poetry and shifting perspectives. The 16 works in the show include paintings and a series of 12 painted paper collages with handwritten text as part of the image.
Dahlia Elsayed combines text and imagery to create visually narrative paintings that document internal and external geographies. She begins with verse as a starting point of each work and uses the edited texts in created landscapes, mixing the psychological with the topographical.
Her work, influenced by conceptual art, comics, and landscape painting, is informed by autobiography and environment, to create illustrated documents of place and memory. Symbols of hard data- flags, borders, geologic forms, horizon lines – are used to frame soft data – wordplay, metaphors, lists allowing image and language to continuously modify each other.
Her paintings, prints and artist books have been shown at galleries and art institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including the 12th Cairo Biennale, and solo exhibitions at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art and the Jersey City Museum. Her work is in the public collections of the The Newark Museum, The Zimmerli Museum, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, New Jersey State Museum, amongst others. Dahlia has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The NJ State Council on the Arts. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works in New Jersey. Ms. Elsayed is Associate Professor of Fine Art at CUNY- LaGuardia Community College.