Tada Asatoorian

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My work looks at how power and surveillance operate not through spectacle, but through the mundane — a badge, a battery, a missing ingredient in a cup of soup. I'm interested in the way ordinary consumer objects and institutional imagery quietly carry disproportionate political weight, often invisibly, until something forces us to notice. I work across oil on canvas, inkjet image transfer, and mixed media, frequently combining photographic source material — protest footage, ICE officers, roller coaster riders with their arms raised — with expressive, hand-painted intervention. The same gesture, arms thrown skyward, can read as joy or as a demand for compliance under threat, depending entirely on context; I'm drawn to images that hold both readings at once, refusing to resolve into a single meaning. Redaction, erasure, and repainting function as both formal device and conceptual argument throughout my practice. In one recent piece, I painted directly over an earlier, more controlled image of an ICE officer, replacing it with something rawer and more undone — performing, physically on the canvas, the same collapse of authority and control that the work describes. Archetypes like the American cowboy, the badge, the flag, recur throughout my work not as celebration but as material to be examined, degraded, and questioned. I'm less interested in illustrating a political position than in slowing down long enough to notice what these familiar objects and figures are actually...

Artwork