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Lebanese American Artist Hannah Shaban Tackles Misconceptions of the Middle East in Latest Work

Sarah Honosky | May 23, 2018

Topics: Arab, art, Artspace, ceramics, Eastern culture, Hannah Shaban, Lebanese American artist, Middle East, RVA ARt, sculpture, vcu

Hannah Shaban leaves her audience with a gift. The first 86 visitors–the number of clay cups to survive the kiln–leave her VCU Graduate Candidacy Exhibition with full hands and a better understanding of what it means to be Arab American.

The opening night of Shaban’s exhibition at Artspace Richmond, she and her mother welcomed the guests trickling into the area as though they had been waiting for them all evening–sitting them down, feeding them a traditional Lebanese cake baked by her aunt, and gifting them with a hand-crafted Arabic coffee cup, plucked from the display on the wall.

Photo By: @hannah.shaban

It’s a performance piece, built as though you are stepping into their living room. At the beginning, the ceramic cups line the wall like an array of family photos, the display behind them yellowed with coffee, so even after they are taken down, their outline is unmistakable. By the end, the wall is empty.

“When you take a picture frame off the wall, it leaves a little bit of a halo. I was pushing for that,” said Shaban. “These cups are something I’ve cherished for a long time and I’m giving them to you. I wanted to fill their hands.”

Shaban is an MFA candidate at VCU with a focus on ceramic sculpture.  As a first generation Lebanese American woman, most of her pieces wrestle with identity, with the Western misconceptions that pervade representations of Eastern culture.

“I couldn’t really ignore what was happening in the media and how Arabs are being represented, from 9/11 to the Syrian refugee crisis happening now. It’s this weirdly awful negative image that represents nothing about our true culture,” said Shaban.

Shaban spent this semester focused inward, on her grandmothers, on the hospitality and generosity that that defines her culture, “If you have something to give, you give it all.”

Photo By: @hannah.shaban

Counter to the American standards of generosity, nothing is ever expected in return. There is no bookend of apologies or bargains, it is a pay-it-forward ideology so that if someone is ever in need, they won’t even have to ask.

Shaban’s life-size, realistic sculpted figures insert the audience into the scene, using spatial and physical interaction to take viewers into the environment. It’s an immersion of sorts, created to shatter the stereotypical Western assumptions that inform their understanding of the Middle East. They are left with a gift, be it the hospitality and kindness of a stranger, or the beautiful delicacy of a cup.

Photo By: @hannah.shaban

“Every time people see [the cup], they will remember the act that my mother and I did, the act of giving away the cups, of welcoming them all in,” said Shaban.

The sculptures themselves are stunning, so realistic that walking into the gallery space almost feels like an invasion of privacy, an interruption of an intimate moment. Looking at them, it’s hard to believe that Shaban only discovered her gift for ceramic sculpture in her last semester of undergrad.

“I think of it as another language, as another way of translating my life,” said Shaban. “I feel like in my head I’m constantly jumping between Arabic and English, between my American identity and my Arab identity, and clay comes in as another language of mine, another thing that I’m translating myself in and out of.”

As a first-generation American, Shaban said she is constantly forced to address the same question: “Where better?” In fact, it’s the central theme of one of her recent installations, an eight-and-a-half-foot tall rock wall, based off the retaining wall holding off the hill behind her grandparents’ house in Ammatour, Lebanon. It’s the place where relatives and people of the village come to greet her when she visits every summer, and ask, ‘Wayn ahla, Amerca ow Libnan?’ meaning, ‘Where do you like more, America or Lebanon?’

Photo By: @hannah.shaban

“We all are missing something here. There’s a popping back and forth between cultures,” said Shaban. It is a constant pressure to choose between two worlds, as though the cultures can’t exist in tandem.

It doesn’t help that Western culture has divided the Middle East into a series of stereotypes, with their only redeeming quality being beautiful women and hummus–that Americans are then defiling with avocado.

She spoke about the first images of the Middle East created by French Orientalist painters, who created the initial allure of Arab culture: beautiful possessed women, silks, architecture, and men with beards and curved swords. A series of stereotypes: beautiful, but cliched.

“I wanted to take my modern Arab subjects and layer them with this orientalist design–like things that were originally so seductive, I wanted to take that old seduction and put it on my modern subjects,” said Shaban.  “Lure people in with the beauty, have them stick around for the substance.”

Though there is an inherent politicism surrounding the Middle East, Shaban’s focus on social and cultural elements means she deals more with addressing the harmful cliches than the complex political landscape surrounding American foreign politics. Though she tried to push away from her focus on identity, feeling pressured to tackle the “big stuff” like the Syrian refugee crisis, it felt less authentic in her work.

Photo Courtesy of Artspace Richmond

“It wasn’t my story, I felt like I was almost cheating using them,” said Shaban. “What connection do I really have with Syrians being displaced from their homes, why did I feel like I could use their story in art?”

Instead, she turned again to the universality of identity, questions of who you are, and where you belong. Shaban is repairing the small damages, that in summation prove no less harmful. American misunderstanding and ignorance of the Middle East attempts to define a culture they don’t even understand, and Shaban’s work welcomes them into their ignorance, shows them hospitality and kindness, and then–sometimes–leaves them with a cup.

TOp Photo By: @hannah.shaban

 

VA artist brings new life to decayed street posters in collage work

Jo Rozycki | August 9, 2017

Topics: ceramics, collage, Matthew Grimes, Pottery, vmfa, VMFA Fellowship, VMFA fellowship grant

For Matthew Grimes, growing up in a beautiful old house in Winchester, Virginia, deeply influenced his view of the world.

“When I was younger, I played outside a lot. We were raised in a rather old-fashioned environment,” Grimes said. “We were taught how to hunt and fish, but it wasn’t about what goes up on the wall. It was about the commuting with nature, nature’s lessons that were focused on, as in patience, seeing, listening, getting outside of yourself.”

                                      Photo by Matthew Grimes

Through those lessons, Grimes found connection from the natural world to the artistic world through clay, specifically pottery.

“I realized, ‘wow, I can draw, I can paint, I can focus on the surface just as much as the full round entity,’” he said. “The element of fire was always a huge draw. You have control over it, yet at the same time, you almost never have full control over the flame and the alchemy of burning.”

After receiving his BFA in ceramics from James Madison University, Grimes apprenticed at a studio in Nelson County with Kevin Crowe. Grimes never found reason to leave Virginia. “Virginia is just a fantastic state. It’s culturally diverse. He moved up to the Northern Neck, then settled in D.C. His wife, who is Chilean, moved the two of them down to Chile, which is arguably where Grimes’s prime work began.

With a background in photography, Grimes photographed his travels throughout Central and South America. “The collage came about within my travels, moving around, or just simply checking out destinations, which quite often happened because of [ex wife’s] work,” said Grimes. “I was finding papers in the streets, and it wasn’t at all about their messages. It was simply just the composition, just the raw color and design and sense of place that they offered.” Thus began Grimes’s work in collage.

Using found objects from his travels, specifically carteles, or street papers, Grimes would mix spray paint, house paint, graffiti markers, billboard paper, and more. His work sparks images of bustling streets, years of wear, tear, weathering, and multiple artists’ work piling on top of one another. Faces, letters, lines, and shapes take up the space beside blocks of color and papers, sometimes with faces staring back. “That slow absorption of the shape, the lines, the volume of an object just gradually makes its way into me, and then is reinterpreted either through clay or nowadays in the collage,” said Grimes.

                                           Photo by Matthew Grimes

Grimes found that his passion for working in the three-dimensional with pottery was translated into the works of bringing the three-dimensional of found objects into the predominantly two-dimensional collage.

“You can say there’s a degree of sculpture in the collage. There’s also painting, drawing, additive, subtractive, action. I think that culmination is what drew me into collage and, for the time being, away from ceramics,” he said. Because working with a kiln can often be dependent on how the pieces come out of the fire, Grimes was used to allowing time, nature, and the work itself taking him in the direction it needed to go in.

Receiving the $8,000 professional grant in mixed media from the VMFA Fellowship Program was a huge “shot in the arm” for Grimes. “It helped me realize…in the art scene, there’s no predetermined route. There’s no ladder of succession. It’s not about the monetary gain. It’s just about being able to have the choice to continue to do so,” he said.

“The world collage has allowed me into, in showing venues and other artists, are completely different from the clay world.” What appealed most to Grimes about receiving this grant was the flexibility of its use.”

“The biggest aspect of that was simply confidence, realizing ‘no matter how I go about this, if I feel good about it, if I’m at the edge of scraping against an idea that’s so far from me that I’m coming away with the tools to push and to realize that this is a good thing. This is real. This is something I can do.’”

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