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Artist Spotlight with Esther Elia Ancestors (detail), 2021, Acrylic and clay sculpture elements, 30’10 x 7’3 Ancestors 2, 2021, Acrylic, 21’4 x 9’2

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Artist Spotlight with Esther Elia

Posted: Jun 15, 2023

ArteEast is pleased to present an interview with artist Esther Elia as part of our Artist Spotlight series.

Esther Elia (she/her) received a BFA in Illustration from California College of the Arts, and a Masters of Fine Arts with a focus in Painting/Drawing from the University of New Mexico. She uses sculpture and large-scale painting to reflect the contemporary Assyrian experience, and the ways culture and ritual is maintained and created in diaspora. Elia’s work combats the notion that Assyrian Art only exists within the ancient past, and through the use of material and the visual impacts of diaspora, Elia documents the next phase of the Assyrian identity. While ancient Assyrian art documented the deities that were born out of the Mesopotamian landscape, Elia imagines how these deities have shifted in diaspora. They take on new faces, new occupations – rooted in homeland, and yet evolving to reflect the needs of a generation exiled  from their Indigenous home. Her work has been displayed in the deYoung Open Exhibition, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Facebook offices, Reconstructed Mag, and the Assyrian region of Iraq (Nahla).

ArteEast: Can you tell us about your work in general and the main themes you return to in your practice?

Esther Elia: Like many artists, I love and am most inspired by storytelling. My family has cultivated a rich home  environment of storytelling, and my mother employed many tactics throughout my childhood to develop our own sense of ourselves and our burgeoning personal histories through the practice of  telling our daily stories. Our stories were then related to other stories — from our familial, religious, or cultural archive. In this way, a story about how I had run into the sprinklers that day because of  the heat might be likened to how my deceased grandmother would march fully clothed into the pool on hot days. This connected me to my history, to ancestors I wasn’t alive to meet, and developed a sense that the smallest personal experience could be felt and related to by all those who came before me (and those who would come after me). I continue to operate out of personal  histories, micro-histories, and make work out of my own history and the history of my people – the Assyrians. As a displaced people, a people group that does not have power in our Indigenous homeland, the telling of these stories becomes a vital part of our cultural survival. We are counted on to preserve our own culture and history, since there is not a government to do it for us! 

AE: You are about to complete your MFA in Albuquerque, at the University of New Mexico. How has this 3-year experience impacted your practice? In what ways has your work evolved?  

EE: I went into this program thinking that three years was not ideal — I was in a hurry and thought two years was quite sufficient. However, after visiting the UNM campus, there was something there  that couldn’t be quantified — I knew it was the right program for me. I had never been to New Mexico, and I couldn’t have understood what an impact it would have on my education and art practice, to be surrounded by Indigenous culture. Side note — every Assyrian living in the diaspora has had the experience where someone asks us, what are you? Assyrian. “Ah! Syrian!” This  exchange happens constantly — except in places like Turlock, California where I grew up — it’s a  small town with a huge Assyrian population, so everyone knows about us. There’s something  more than gratifying when I say “I’m Assyrian” and the response is, “Oh awesome, my neighbor is  Assyrian!” It’s more than being seen or acknowledged, it’s also that you don’t have to explain your  history, and hold the weight of being the only Assyrian person they have ever met. I think in the  same way, I immediately recognized that Native Americans faced the same lack of visibility. This  should be obvious, but until I was in a place that held so much Indigenous culture, did I recognize  that we had a lot in common experientially. The biggest impact of this was in critiques — it was so  noticeable in the feedback I was getting that my work was being understood in ways that it hadn’t  been before. Just having Native American faculty in the department made it so that they were responding to my work in ways that made me feel seen, but had also clearly impacted the way all non-Native faculty looked at work as well, resulting in a safety to explore and experiment in ways I  couldn’t have known I was afraid of and avoiding. I started speaking more freely, creating more freely. Suddenly it was normal to be mixed, to be learning one’s own language because of  historical language suppression, normal to “not have a country” in the eyes of many, to be fighting for land while also being displaced. I didn’t have to be the expert on my culture, just the expert on  my own experience. It made me feel really smart for the first time! Such a little thing that opened  me up — because if I was smart, if I was considered the expert on my own experience, then I could draw from that and make whatever I was interested in. My work evolved and suddenly there was no fear in collaboration, there were no bad ideas, and I started making things that were heartfelt and straight up sappy! Which felt really good — especially when it was received with understanding. 

AE: Elaborate on your MFA senior thesis show which was in February 2023, in which you explored monumental sculptures and tiling. 

EE: I had entered the program hoping that I would get to do tiling. From my first semester I was trying to fit it in literally or conceptually. I had gone through a couple personal experiences that had left  me feeling unsafe — hyper-vigilant in public spaces, trying to be constantly aware of my  surroundings. My father’s immediate family fled modern-day Iran slowly from 1915-1920ish during the Armenian/Assyrian/Greek Genocide, and carried with them the trauma of those massacres. When they came to America, one of the main themes they continued to express gratitude for was safety. They could practice their religion (Christianity), they could work and travel and live with hardly any fear. I never got to meet my grandparents, and I don’t know how much this oral history holds true in the day-to-day, but a sort of fable was created slowly and passed around within the greater Assyrian community that Iran was dangerous and America was safe. This was amplified and confirmed by Western media, then the fable grew larger and made me feel like nothing bad could happen to you in America — the place where we have rights. This is a fairly normal belief for many Americans, but when you have a history that seems to back that up with direct evidence —  when your relatives were refugees, I think it roots a little deeper in the psyche. I’m most interested  in speaking to the experiences of Assyrians in diaspora, and so I started pondering this idea of  one place being safe, and another place not being safe — was that true? Also about the reality that a place couldn’t be fully safe, and my own personal reality that I was facing in America certain dangers that my relatives would have associated with Iran — an “unsafe place.” This all  culminated in a sort of obsession with the concept of a hammam, the tradition of bathhouses,  which led to the need to express images through tile work. I knew I needed to speak to female safety, and I knew I needed to do it in tile. It just so happens that there is an abundance of Mexican tile in New Mexico, and a place where tiling is embedded in the regional aesthetics. At  the same time, I was drawing “Assyrian bodybuilder deities” — figures that reflected elements  from the ancient Assyrian pantheon, while also speaking to a very real trend I was seeing and  experiencing through instagram of Assyrian women from my community bodybuilding and powerlifting — their gym selfies popping up on my feed. By referencing them and making them  into “diaspora deities” — it both documented an ultra-contemporary Assyrian history, while also speaking to my own personal struggles with feeling safe. Portraying muscular Assyrian women with wings, multiple limbs, dressed in competition bikinis started to create my own personal series of amulets. The monumental tile sculptures that resulted from these drawings was an ordained combination of space, time, resources, and funding. Three years at an affordable school, living in an affordable city, within a community of makers and crafters, with affordable tiles for sale in town?! Everything came together so that I could finally attempt a monumental sculpture —  something I’ve been dying to do — since Assyrian art is almost exclusively associated with monumental sculpture! In the end, everything came together beautifully — the figures were deities born and raised in diaspora, whose purpose was to provide safety to the Assyrian community born and raised far away from home. The tiling spoke to the environment they grew up in, a material that is both familiar and foreign, their flatness referencing the bas-reliefs that resided in our ancient palaces. The show was titled “Diasporic Deities,” and featured prominently the new deity Malikta (Queen) and Miztanta (woman who is hairy all over).

AE: In the Summer of 2022, you traveled to several Assyrian villages in northern Iraq. What was this  experience like and tell us about your Native Soil project which came about from this journey? How do  you plan to incorporate this experience within your personal and collaborative practice? 

EE: Yes! There is an Assyrian organization called Gishru: Bridge to Assyria, which takes Assyrians from the diaspora to visit a piece of our homeland and make connections there. I went with a  wonderful group of people, and while I was there, recognized that the mountains of Northern Iraq housed a ton of natural clay! This should be obvious considering our history, but it just so happened I was taking a class called Pueblo Pottery with renowned potter Clarence Cruz at UNM, and he had taught us how to recognize clay, harvest it, and then the Pueblo process of hand building, stone-polishing, sanding, decorating, and outside firing. When I went to Northern Iraq, I  was taking this class for the second time, and had gotten a little better at recognizing clay. Clarence Cruz is one of my favorite professors, and so I mentioned in passing after I got back that I had seen a lot of clay, and would he ever consider going to Iraq? He immediately was on board, and we started developing Native Soil — a project that takes Native American potters to Assyrian villages in Iraq to do a trans-Indigenous cultural exchange centered around clay workshops. We’re doing our first trip this June, 2023, and are hoping this can be something we do on a regular basis, bringing Indigenous potters to Iraq, and hopefully visa-versa — bring Indigenous Assyrians to Native American land to hold clay workshops. There was something  immediate about the process of harvesting clay that made clear something more than anything else —  the value of land and the gifts land gives. More importantly, the need for Indigenous communities  to have access to their land and the gifts it offers us. The pottery we made in that UNM class were love letters to the land, and to the people who are the rightful stewards of it. Mr. Cruz taught us in the way that was passed down to him generationally how to recognize and harvest clay — and it enabled me to then recognize clay in my own Indigenous homeland. It was such a gift, I felt it needed to be expanded — and that the opportunity needed to be facilitated for Assyrians to make  their own objects out of their land. Land that is contested, that has been difficult to retain, that holds our whole history. What better way to do this than by bringing a people group that understands this on a personal level? I had this conversation with Mr. Cruz in December of 2022, and we set the date for the trip to be 6 months later (June 2023), which made it difficult to apply for large sources of funding — so this trip was made possible through crowdfunding and the help of a couple Assyrian organizations in the U.S. (Assyrian Aid Foundation of Chicago, Assyrian Foundation of America, and the Assyrian Cultural Foundation). This first trip will answer a lot of questions, and hopefully create a clear path forward with similar types of collaborations. 

AE: What or who are some of your major creative influences, and why? 

EE: There are many artists — some notable ones being Michael Rakowitz, Marjane Satrapi, Hayv  Kahraman, Shirin Neshat — you know, storytellers! Another has been wrestling documentaries —  I’m not fully sure why, but they hit me in the gut and feel important — whether it be the showmanship or the suffering or the narratives or the responses from the crowd. Specifically the ones about the Iron Sheikh and Jake the Snake Roberts. I also became totally obsessed with Afghan War Rugs — I was already deeply affected by textiles, and lived my life on Persian rugs from a great-uncle’s rug shop. But the immediacy of rugs being created as documentations of current events was thrilling. Persian rug iconography speaks to specific histories of regions, families, dyes that are available, plant and animal life that are around. They exist as documents.  War Rugs take this concept and make it accessible to a larger audience, immediately  communicating where the rug was made and what the region looked like. It tells stories we can envision and relate to, and that was so exciting and impactful for me to see, and so relatable to my own practice and ideas about how our traditional art can change and evolve. 

Lastly, the largest influence on my personal practice is religion. Consistent religious practice and  ritual, sacred text, prayer, and the community that comes with it has been my framework that underlines why I make. I think my family’s personal history with religious persecution has influenced this, but it also feels like such a natural way of living, framing everything that happens within a larger spiritual context. Seeing my art practice as something that is a sacrifice to my people, and through honoring them, becomes pleasing to God. I’ve been really into the idea lately that we worship God by worshiping and honoring others, and making art about people and stories is the ultimate way of honoring someone, in my opinion. I felt this deeply when I watched the film The Color of Love by Maryam Keshavarz — it was such a beautiful portrayal of how romantic love and religious love become intertwined — how one sets the stage for the other. 

AE: What are you currently working on and do you have any shows or projects upcoming in 2023-2024? 

EE: Currently up is a show Shraya d’Ashureta which translates to “Light of the Assyrian woman” and features some tiled lamps that continue on the theme of diasporic deities. It will be up at Park Life Gallery in San Francisco from May 19 – June 25. After I get back from Iraq in June, I’m hoping to get to devote lots of time to another project I’ve been working on — the Assyrian Prayer Bowl Archive, which collects sacred words from the Assyrian community and puts them on clay bowls in the style of Incantation Bowls. (www.prayerbowlarchive.com) I have been making the bowls and writing on them, and hope to have a large collection of them by the end of the year. I’m also collecting audio recordings of people speaking their submissions to the project, and am dreaming of a whole audio/visual installation that reflects the contemporary Assyrian nation — and a  documentation of our contemporary microhistories on objects that relate to our culture. I can’t think of anything else that is immediately upcoming — which is exciting — it gives me the opportunity to dig my teeth into something else in the privacy of my studio. It’s always nice to be able to work  something out privately before it’s released to the eyes and opinions of the general public!

ESTHER ELIA ONLINE:

Website: estherestheresther.com

Instagram: @malikta.esther

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