I'm a San Francisco bay area artist working mainly in mixed media and conceptual art. My cultural background as an Iranian/Armenian/American informs my work as I explore the ironies of identity and representation.

In my earlier work I explored language and metaphor, drawing from Persian traditions in poetry and calligraphy, juxtaposed with contemporary language of popular media. In these, the process often incorporated printmaking and tracing as a metaphor for memory and history.

These days I'm focusing on portraiture as a challenge in revealing identity and as a self gratifying exercise which has little to do with the observed and more to do with the observer. While I completely give in to the pleasures of working from a model, I focus mainly on ideas of absence, void, and negative space.
The exercise takes me on a journey in which I can lose myself in the process and choose between recovery, projection or self negation at any point. The series also allows me to use the genre of portraiture to comment on subjective representation on a social/political level as well as personal.