Artists Connect Series, with Roya Amigh & Lani Asuncion

Join us on Monday, June 14 at 2:00pm for one of our Artists Connect Talks! This talk brings together, 2021 National Prize Show exhibiting artists and award winners, Roya Amigh and Lani Asuncion in conversation about their art practice. This event will occur on CAA's Instagram Live, @cambridgeart.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Roya Amigh combines thread and paper into her version of contemporary Persian miniatures that focus on Iranian women's social history and identity at the intersection of gender and sexuality.

Persian miniature illustrates texts, mostly classical Iranian literature, made using vivid gouache paint on paper. Roya's Persian miniatures eliminate most of the colors, reform the figures, and sometimes their genders give a strong quality of line and texture. She recreates many Persian miniatures by gluing thread on paper. She makes many of these tiny drawings, then assembles them in fragmented pieces that all are stitched to each other by the thread to build up the work. Persian miniature has tremendous characters, symbols, and mythical beings, which she furnishes with her feminist interpretations and interweaves with the new narration of the real events.

Roya's work narrates events and their effects on women’s everyday lives from a third-person perspective. She integrates these collective memories with folktales and classic Iranian literature. Most of the classical literature, written by men, has female subjugation and loss of self-determination, but the folktales, mostly narrated by women, have the liberation of sexuality. She uses this gender differentiation, interlocked with the erotic desires and frustrations in response to social values. She more of Roya's artwork here

Lani Asuncion is a Boston-based artist who grew up in O’ahu, HI, and Okinawa, Japan, with roots in Appalachia. They are a multimedia artist who performs in both live public and private spaces using video, sound, projection, and movement to create a visual language that comes from their identity as a queer multicultural third-generation Filipinx artist. Asuncion’s work explores how media and new technologies can be used in transmedia storytelling as a tool to visually create a dialogue around the eco-tourism in Hawaii and throughout the Pacific Islands, and the many connections it has to biopolitics and militarism throughout American history. They use technology as a tool to create conversations and connections to create decolonized space and place, associated with colonized and Imperialist ideologies. See more of Lani's artwork here