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Yasmeen Abdallah Part 2   The following is a conversation I had with Yasmeen about her work, life, and influences, along with images of her new works.   John: To get started, could you tell us something about your work and background as an artist, and if there’s any advice you could give young artists?   Yasmeen: I’m really fascinated by the mechanics of living things – our species in particular, and the reactions that are caused by human actions. I began to really tap into this more in my teens, as I was becoming aware of the normalizing of injustice and indignity at the micro and macro levels throughout the world. It was an overwhelming sort of epiphany. I had been aware of these things for years prior, but something awakened in me where I could not be subservient. I hadn’t really had much exposure to art at this…

Drawing Hoaxes   In our current political environment, fundamental scientific truths are often called into question for political gain, through propaganda fueled by a biased media and the proliferation of journalistic sensationalism. The president says something that is blatantly untrue, and people believe it, despite the facts. When something false is repeated often enough, it can becomea truth. We receiveit as right, correct, even true. When does this happen? How are our beliefs formed? Why?   Scientific hoaxes are nothing new. Throughout our history, they have been perpetrated both on grand scales and in the everyday, within daily news coverage. Sometimes this misinformation is unintentionally repeated, other times it is intentionally pushed as a means to coerce political action.   Well know examples include the Piltdown Man (1912), Cardiff Giant (1869), and Shinichi Fujimura (1981) – see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/five-of-the-most-famous-scientific-hoaxes/2015/03/02/a0b64f9e-b6cd-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b148f496cad7 The author Kurt Anderson tracks the progression of our post-truth reality throughout…

Leslie Roberts – ‘Drawing Instructions”   Leslie Roberts makes diagrammatic works that revel in the space between drawing and painting. They also excitingly explore the spaces between looking, seeing, and thinking (or decoding, problem solving, “figuring out”). Her works translate often serendipitously found texts into patterns. Within the parameters of each work exists every aspect of this transmutatative process – the source words Leslie recorded are written out, the code by which she then translates these words into gridded color is delineated, and the resulting patterns are rendered visible. In a sense, Leslie’s works chart the process by which a word can be spoken, heard, considered, and then absorbed as meaning. Her works collapse the space between thought and action, between the abstract and the concrete.   Myriad artists have grappled with the relationship between the notation and the image. In the diagrammatic works of John Cage, Alfred Jensen, and…

When I first met Yasmeen Abdallah at Pratt Institute in the mid-2000’s, she was lugging gallon jugs of water from her thesis exhibition. Why she was doing this? Was it part of her work? A labor of the everyday that would result in an exquisitely tough piece of art? Or was she just cleaning up the space? I didn’t know, but as it turns out, it was likely all of those things. I talked to Yasmeen that day about her work and her process and have been hooked on her as an artist ever since. Yasmeen’s art-making methodology is fused integrally with her life – all of her actions, from drinking tea and sharing stories with friends and family, to her political activism and community outreach actions, to her struggle to pay the rent – are her work. She channels these experiences intothe materials she chooses and into the processes…