Like Nayyirah Waheed, whose poem “A Genocide for Flowers” inspired the title for this exhibition, Alexandria Smith’s and Katherine Toukhy’s respective work responds to notions of multiple and developing identities.
Seemingly light-hearted with its bold colors and cartoonish aesthetics, Alexandria Smith’s paintings rely on the repetitive but fragmented representation of ribbons, shoes, pigtails and dresses to convey an uneasy feeling of almost playful games, set in liminal spaces that allude to domestic and urban environments.
Katherine Toukhy’s wall works are densely layered, hand-drawn collages that compose small and large-scale figures. These characters are built with Islamic and camouflage patterns, orientalist imagery, and evocative landscapes, as if they were growing out of their layered histories and herstories.
http://www.fivemyles.org/a-smith-k-toukhy
