Anteaters in the Arts Alumni Profile: Samira Yamin, M.F.A. ’11 By Allyson Unzicker, Associate Director & Curator, University Art Galleries Samira Yamin, M.F.A. ’11, is an IranianAmerican artist based in Los Angeles who uses war photography as her medium. As an Iranian American who felt disconnected from depictions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the media post 9/11, she was inspired to incorporate the imagery into her practice. In her decade-long series Geometries, she repurposes the pages of TIME magazine by painstakingly cutting sacred Islamic architectural patterns directly onto them. These intricate geometric carvings are crafted by hand using a light box and an X-Acto knife, often taking her months to complete. Geometries challenges and criticizes the narrow perspective in American news and media on the Middle East that depicts solely images of war, violence and death. By meticulously embellishing the magazine pages with traditional Islamic patterns, Yamin creates a structure in order to break apart this narrative of chaotic violence. Yamin’s obsessive and time-consuming method is a poetic meditation on the truth of an image. Yamin’s process of obfuscating images is explored further in her most recent series Refractions. Rather than carving into the pages of TIME magazine as in Geometries, she carves optical glass and places it atop the pages in order to refract images of the Syrian Civil War. In order to understand the optical image in its entirety, the viewer is required to move around its surface. This visual disconnect between the image and 18
its sculptural exterior disallows the ability to see the work from a single vantage point. Rather than becoming desensitized by mass media images of war, the sensitivity of Yamin’s handiwork urges us to take another look, a slower and more critical one. During the pandemic, Yamin was included in two exhibitions, To View a Plastic Flower (Feb. 13–April 19, 2020) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) and Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Selections from the Rose Collection 1933–2018 (Feb. 7, 2020–Sept. 13, 2020) at the Rose Museum. The concept behind the group exhibition To View a Plastic Flower at LAMAG centered on the representation of war in the media. As this topic is rarely covered
