Common Language: Dahlia Elsayed

The Nostalgia Hour, 2020, 9.5” H x 12” W 8” D, ceramic and wood

Common Language, 2020, 42.5” H x 56” W, acrylic on paper

Are We There Yet?, 2020, acrylic on paper, bound as a book

Tender Climbers, 2017, 45” H x 65” W, 2017, acrylic on paper

Station Updates, 2017, 20” H x 16” W each (triptych), acrylic and collage on paper

March 17 - April 17, 2020 The Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery Hepburn Hall, Room 323 New Jersey City University 2039 John F. Kennedy Blvd., Jersey City, NJ 07305 www.njcu.edu/community/centerarts/visual-arts

The Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery New Jersey City University

Various Borders, 2017, 28” H x 44” W, acrylic on paper

She identifies the works in Common Language as “myth pictures for placelessness,” visual narratives that are rooted in diasporic commonalities (i.e. concepts of return, mutable histories, and alternative futures, hybrid identity” in forms that distrupt the illusion of the 2D plane, and acknowledge the limitations of perceptual truth. Solid, shadowless shapes on deep grounds and skewed perspectives suggest a trippy trompe l’oeil, a visual form of speculative fiction that suggests worlds that seem both familiar and unknown, highlighting the instability of a remembered landscape.

Procession Towards the Second Horizon, 2020, 9.5” H x 12” W x 8” D, ceramic on wood

Her interest in this type of work is personal: for three generations, her family has been displaced from continent to continent, which has fostered in her a deep curiosity into how memory shapes landscapes, and its inverse, how landscaping shapes memory.

For Dahlia Elsayed, writing and painting are interwined. Elsayed’s background in creative writing informs her ideas of the relationship between language and image. For over two decades, she’s made paintings and installations that aim to transport a viewer into fictional landscapes that suggest both material places and psychologicalstates.

The works selected for Common Language are from 2015-2020, and as a whole, address the primary theme of her work: connecting internal and external senses of place. More specifically, the paintings, artist book, and ceramic installations attempt to pair a diasporan narrative with a terra firma, identifying the experimental elements of here/there in a concrete and peotic way. For example, in Various Borders, a playground of barriers appears as tunnels, floating fences, an obscured pit, a trafficstrip. In View From the Erasure Zone, two floating landmasses appear to drift away from a bounding strip of caution tape.

In the two installations of Elsayed’s ceramic work, dozens of colorful figures stand at different heights within a painted diorama. The forms evoke the figurative and architectural, often with holes punched out or jagged edges. They are at once tactile gameboards of playful, modular shapes but also landscapes of ruin, with stunned faces staring back. Here too, an illusion is at play--the figures are flat, with unglazed bisque edges and back, revealing an additional fiction.

Throughout the ceramics and paintings, a symbolic vocabulary in developed, which when juxtaposed with text, presents allegorical landscapes that connect typography and psychology. Elsayed creates a visual diary of her world-building, presents a dual way of reading personal territory that provokes exploration, pause, and suggestion.

Over Some Horizon, 2020, ceramic sculpture View from the Erasure Zone, 2020, 40” H x 26” W each (dipytch), acrylic on paper

Some Kind of Itch, 2016, 40” H x 26” W each (dipytch), acrylic on paper