Yen Ha

Artist Statement:

The shape of my memory seems to transmute so fluidly over the course of time that I can never be sure whether what I remember is objective truth or subjective longing. Rooted in small scale gestures, aggregated over weeks into expansive drawings, my work begins rooted in the reality of places I’ve traveled or the quotidian objects I might encounter on the way from the kitchen to the dining table. Through an abstracted, and occasionally distracted, form of remembrance I transform their actuality into a landscape of something else entirely. My art practice is, by necessity, a practice of resiliency, finding brief moments to make art in the spaces left to me between taking the kids to school, running an architecture firm and cooking dinner. I painstakingly draw to remind us that the grand act of creation can be found in fragments of stolen time. Though my work is normally based in the memory of places I’ve traveled, my recent work, produced during the pandemic, can be thought of as landscapes of the imaginary. I am dreaming of the salty taste of ocean waves, of the brisk tang of mountain air. The imaginary landscapes express change and uncertainty even as optimism floats through the work. Derived from the natural world, the drawings evoke an atmosphere of constant flux, resilient in its ability to endure and adapt.