Connie Zheng

Artist Statement

I am a Chinese-American artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker. For the past seven years, I’ve been moving between drawing, text, installation and time-based practices to examine the interplays of diasporic memory, culture and environmental history. Since 2021, I have been making wall-sized map drawings as a method for inviting audiences to re-orient to our surroundings — especially places we consider ‘home’ — in productively alien ways, by combining narratives of the land that are sometimes buried or marginalized. My works are grounded in a diasporic sense of belonging, an awe for the multiplicity of place, and an attunement to the intersections of personal narrative, communal histories, and land use. Collage is my primary aesthetic strategy: I see my maps as collages of public and private knowledge; my films as containers for collaging time, voice and narrative; and my sound work as collages of sonic encounters between my body and its surroundings.

Guest Passage, 2023. 12-channel sound installation with video projection. Installed for the Bay Area Now 9 Triennial at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Photography by Jenna Garrett

Bio

Connie Zheng was born in north-central China and is based out of Northern California, on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people. Her projects have been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), Framer Framed (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and the Esker Foundation (Calgary, Canada). Her work is held in the permanent collections of KADIST and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Robert H. N. Ho Foundation, among other organizations, and recent press of her work includes coverage in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and MUBI Notebook. Her publications include a chapter in the “Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change”, as well as essays in Small Press Traffic and Errant Journal. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

https://www.conniezheng.com/

Samira Abbassy

Artist Statement

My work responds to my own migrations and cultural shifts, and has lead to questions about where Middle Eastern and Iranian art belongs in a predominantly Eurocentric history of art. Sacred paintings from the major faiths: Christianity, Hinduism and Islam have particularly intrigued me, and lead to finding parallels in both their subject matter and language. For example, the archetypal descent into the underworld in Dante's Inferno can be compared to Mohamed's Night Journey and Christ's Anastasis. In this psychological realm, the body is examined as a psycho/bio/spiritual vehicle. and captures the incorporeal psyche. An example of reference images I incorporate as collaged elements in the work, are mined from Islamic Medical/Anatomical MS (C11th - 17th) and European (15th C. / Medieval) alchemical iconography, which reveal how psychic phenomenas project onto the physical realm. Rather than mere biological diagrams, they transcend the corporeal, and hint at attempts to locate the soul, wherein the body becomes a vehicle of psychological metaphors, portraying various embodied conflicts and dilemmas. My work is in the collections of : the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, British Government Art Collection, the Burger Collection, the Donald Rubin collection (Rubin Museum, NY) and the Grey Art Gallery at NYU.

Samira Abbassy - Topology of a Manic Episode - 2024 - Oil on birch panel - 48x36 inches Photo Credit: Jeanette May

BIO

Samira Abbassy (b.1965, Ahwaz, Iran) is based in New York. Abbassy emigrated to London UK in 1967, studied at the Canterbury College of Art before moving to New York City to co-found the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in 1998, where her studio is based and holds a lifetime tenure position. Abbassy’s work has been shown at the Metropolitan, the British Museum, LACMA and the 26th Venice Biennial. Abbassy’s work is in private and public collections worldwide, including: the Metropolitan Museum, British Museum, British Government Art Collection, Grey Art Gallery at NYU, Burger Collection, Donald Rubin collection, Los Angeles County Museum, Afkhami Collection and Brattleboro Museum VT. Her fellowships include: Yaddo in 2006, 2022 and 2024, and Saltonstall in 2017, two NYFA awards: 2007 in drawing and 2018 in painting, a Joan Mitchell in 2010 and JMF residency in 2025, a Pollock-Krasner in 2014, and nominated for Anonymous Was a Woman in 2018.

https://www.samiraabbassy.com