416 E. Colorado Street, CA 91205, Los Angeles, United States
Open: Wed-Sat 11am-5pm
Artists: Yasmine Nasser Diaz - Lauren Elder - Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich - Samar Al Summary - Haniko Zahra - Aneesa Shami Zizzo
Curated by Rachel Hakimian Emenaker
Mek Contemporary presents Regard, a group exhibition curated by Rachel Hakimian Emenaker, bringing together six artists working across painting, textiles, sculpture, and archival imagery. The exhibition explores the relationship between visibility and recognition, examining how images shape our understanding of bodies, identities, and histories.
An image can preserve a history while distorting it, revealing something about its subject while exposing the expectations of the viewer. The artists in Regard approach this tension from distinct positions, exploring how bodies, identities, and histories are represented and what remains beyond the frame. Their works move between personal experience and political histories, inherited narratives and imagined worlds.
For women whose bodies and cultures have long been subjected to Orientalist fantasies and the patriarchal gaze, visibility can bring both possibility and constraint. The expectation to challenge these representations can impose further demands: to speak for a culture, explain an experience, or transform suffering into a legible narrative. The artists complicate these expectations, making space for pleasure, anger, humor, tenderness, and the contradictions of everyday life to coexist.
In Haniko Zahra’s paintings, figures can be furious, vulnerable, joyful, or at ease, sometimes all at once. Yasmine Nasser Diaz examines intimacy, joy, and cultural expectation through the boundaries between private experience and public perception. Lauren Elder draws on mythology, Persian miniature painting, and ornament to reimagine inherited stories and challenge familiar narratives.
Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich’s paintings draw on her Armenian, Egyptian, and Canadian identities, bringing together different cultural worlds without reconciling them into a single narrative of belonging. Samar Al Summary works with archival photographs from military camps to question the authority of the documentary image and the histories left outside its frame. Aneesa Shami Zizzo cuts and reconstructs imagery from National Geographic alongside reclaimed textile waste, reconsidering how inherited narratives are assembled and what might emerge from their fragments.
Although these artists share concerns with representation, memory, and identity, their works resist a single perspective. Moving between political histories and personal experience, inherited traditions and imagined worlds, they challenge the idea that a person or a culture can be fully understood through the images made of them.
To regard is to look, but also to consider, value, and hold in esteem. Regard invites close attention without assuming that looking grants complete understanding, acknowledging both what an image reveals and what remains beyond its frame.
Sign Up & Never Miss a Show