At Home in Suburbia

In the suburbs of Los Angeles, Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis feels her paintings have found a home in the margins    What better artist to describe the diasporic experience than Sherin Guirguis? The great granddaughter of Attaya Gaddis, one of Egypt's first documentary photographers, she was born in Luxor. She received her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.   If the culture shock of moving from cosmopolitan Egypt to bucolic Santa Barbara and then to capital-of-second-chances Las Vegas wasn’t enough, she now lives in suburban Los Angeles where personal, social and artistic space are (unlike the traffic) fluid. Married and with a new child, she thrives here, with regular local exhibitions as well as numerous showings elsewhere in the States and abroad.   Though she finds similarities between the art worlds of Cairo and Los Angeles – both are in a transformational stage and centered around exceptional non-profit spaces – she says, ‘the main difference between the two is that Cairo’s art world is much more international in its reach, probably due to its geography.’ This explains the contribution that diaspora artists like Guirguis make to places like Los Angeles. Her work is influenced by her exposure to a new culture (Los Angeles) and the city is enhanced by the (Egyptian) culture she brought from home.   She's conscious of her diaspora label. Acclimated as she may be, finally, with the culture and geography of Los Angeles, she does acknowledge her tenuous existential circumstances. ‘Of course, being a part of a diaspora does mean I'm living on the margins to some degree and I have to say I'm now more comfortable in that position than ever before. My work stems from that place, it deals directly with the attempt to find a language that describes that state of otherness that follows you wherever you are. I'm always home and I'm never home.’   It's in these margins where her paintings and sculptures reside. As might be expected from a diaspora artist, her work not only combines documentation and abstraction, but memory. ‘I have many romantic memories of Egypt. What I miss most is the jubilant and proud culture that all Egyptians carry. The richness of the history that is alive every day on the streets. From towering piles of multicoloured plastic bowls on wooden carts in the street market and the endless columns of the Karnak, to the symphony of bodies navigating the street traffic in Cairo.’   Through her work she attempts to identify what she calls 'the complex language of diaspora and the politics inherent within it.’ Like the street life of both Cairo and Los Angeles, her paintings are precious and kinetic, timeless and fleeting. Though the inspiration for her paintings came from a live shot on Egyptian state TV of a crowd in Tahrir Square, her message resonates with all popular uprisings (think of the recent Occupy events).   There's a revolutionary spirit implicit in her practice:  ‘It doesn't address it directly, but it acknowledges the legacy of activism that has changed the social, political and cultural paradigms for women.’ She continues, ‘I like to uncover the politics hidden in elements that are regularly disregarded and purely ornamental or decorative. It is a way for me to locate myself in a politically and culturally shifting paradigm and to develop a language to describe it.’   It shows in her paintings. Created from ink, watercolour, acrylic, some dry pigment and various gold and silver leafing, they are lush and frenetic, with counterpoised eddies of surge and repose, powerful and, at same time, on the verge of tottering. Cinematically, they recall the too-big-to-imagine crowd scenes in The Birth of a Nation, Battleship Potemkin and Ben-Hur. Their forms resemble continents whose malleable and shifting tectonic plates suggest upheaval, both geological and social. Their glowing centres suggest magma – a spontaneous life energy beneath the crust of the surface of pedestrian events and daily life – poised to erupt.   Her sculptures are no less ambiguous than her paintings, both of which describe a revolutionary breaking down of traditional social barriers. They represent acts of defiance; the transformation of jewellery and screens into statement making, three-dimensional, larger than life-sized works of art. She orients them as politicised ornamentation (seductive Bedouin earrings) and architecture (a reference to book two of Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy as well as the Egyptian architectural element, the mashrabiya). Minimal constructions of wood, aluminum, and lead, these pieces are mobile-like, susceptible to ambient air currents and prods from their viewers.   As might be expected from an artist whose experience straddles two diverse, distinct cultures, Guirguis draws artistic inspiration from a combination of rich and complex sources. She cites a couple of movements – the West Coast’s Light and Space and Color Field movements – and a slew of artists – from Helen Frankenthaler, Agnes Martin and Mona Hatoum to Jean-Léon Gérôme and Sandro Botticelli. She admires Louise Bourgeois for ‘her tough, unapologetic approach to dealing with themes that have been marginalised or dismissed as “feminine” through a variety of mediums, many of which were considered very masculine.’   Synthesising elements that are defiant, cheeky and sumptuous, Guirguis’s work harmonises an otherwise dissonant clash of oppositions: Western minimalism vs Eastern decoration, historical vs contemporary, feminine vs masculine and public vs private. Her paintings literally burst at the edges (and dissolve in the centre) while her sculptures function as a Trojan Horse, bold in message and expression, even if their construction is fragile.   Photographer: Monica Nouwens