Yasser Vayani

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

letters to my father began as a mere scattering of ink. Words traced in the isolation of the present, soon suffered a strange and beautiful metamorphosis, dissolving their literal meanings to give birth to a geometry of lines and shadows, a graphic shorthand that did not merely record the historical lineaments of trauma, but dissolved it into something far more fluid: a lifelong meditation on the elastic nature of memory, the heavy passage of time, and those fragile, subjective impressions which, though born in the deep recesses of a single soul, somehow expand until they touch the universal and the political. In this deliberate labor, I found myself executing a fierce, almost violent refusal of easy, syrupy nostalgia which falsifies the past. Instead, I view the landscape of my childhood not as a lost paradise to be mourned, but as an unyielding architecture, a subterranean vault whose cold walls we grasp at so desperately in our desire to remain anchored. Through a system of involuntary association these drawings have detached themselves from the tyranny of chronologies. The words on the page act merely as initial provocations, tiny temporal catalysts, or perhaps keys to a time machine where the memory represents the past, and yet, through the sudden, involuntary return of things long repressed, our deepest desires reveal their true faces. It has become an infinite, lifelong pilgrimage to comprehend how that distant theater of childhood, far from being a sanctuary of...

Artwork