From a young age, Denna Ameen, born to Iranian immigrants and raised in Maryland, was familiar with working with her hands, as her father was a carpenter. Her passion for art led her to study Open Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Through her work, Ameen explores themes of sustainability, the complexities of identity, and the beauty that can be found in overlooked and forgotten materials.

 My work exists within a particular mindset: the possibility of remembering our origins. It begins in the day, using the automatic drawing technique to channel memories and visions with quick sketches and annotations on Post-It notes. I later use these notes as data to be transferred to my large canvases. Once in the studio, the painting process begins, and the collaboration of drawing and painting becomes one of activation of the mediums’ expressive potential. This is a project built on the premise that impulses when contained can bring

 My paintings explore specific memories that conflate the past, present, and future, resulting in alternative narratives. Hypermnesia is an “increasing mnestic capacity in the event of crisis or trauma,” as defined by Paolo Virno in Déjà Vu and the End of History. I correlate this heightened experience with memory through meticulously rendered details that come forward through a haze of distorted recollection and active imagination. My paintings are tight––rendered concretely and opaquely. Their crispness and shallow depth

 Is ‘You’ ‘I’? Do my feelings oscillate between love and hate for ‘You’? While my body is here, my mind wanders there—so, where am I? Encountering this overwhelming sensation, I search for a language to articulate the liminal experiences that straddle the dichotomies of self/other, love/hate, desire/repulsion, ecstasy/pain, and here/there. My painting practice explores these ambiguous territories where clarity dissolves and what remains is the unsettling, yet compelling realm of that which is abject.

 I am a multidisciplinary artist. My work is concerned with the Black American vernacular experience. The work entails collecting and gathering found materials, Georgia red clay, and Dutch Wax cloth. I create a conversation between family, tradition, and the spiritual and material relationship between Africa and the South. My process is influenced by hip-hop, the way it gathers different cultural influences through sampling. Like the music, my work is charged with an energy passed down, then channeled through the diaspora

 Probing the subterranean depths within, my recent works focus on the descent to the underworld that is integral to the monomyth (“hero’s journey”). The passage of thresholds, trials, encounters, and symbolic death all find their place in this katabasis mythology. These drawings explore a quest into the cave of the mind through a combination of archetypal symbolism and uncanny aesthetics.

 I plumb the Internet, collect vernacular photography, and forage a wide range of printed materials to discover sources that are transformed by a variety of processes: burning/laser technology, accumulation, embossing/debossing, interference, physical distressing, and gilding. With its associations to value and trade, the historic role of the gold standard in establishing modern banking and the distribution of wealth, gold is central to my effort to synthesize the intersection of popular culture and history with issues related to visibility, desire, and power.

 My work examines the relationship between materiality and language. Recurring bodies and landscapes allude to historical Western painting, while a cosmic subtext, prompted by an interest in the structure of cosmologies, decentralizes traditional narrative. The allegorical processions of objects and figures usually phase in and out of their forms, referencing the permeability of the body, the fragility of structure, the body’s relationship to time, and notions of material/immaterial experiences. My practice incorporates