Elina Ansary: I Am With You

Exhibition Abstract

I Am With You is a series of new paintings that blend memories with real-time observations, reordering them in a process of Waking Dream Generation. Like dreams, they materialized intuitively, guided by synchronicity, and they contain messages. Like dreams, they're scenes occurring in the collective unconscious outside of linear time. 

Images from daily life, childhood, and family history mingle with mythological figures and archeological artifacts. They shuffle and recombine into puzzling narratives laden with obscure, idiosyncratic symbolism. Representational images have an increasingly dubious relationship to truth. They question what's real. Glitches, lens flares, and static are markers of the camera's subjective point-of-view, the machine version of the hallucinogenic perceptual glitches produced by our imperfect sensory organs inside our imperfect brains. 

I Am With You sifts through the inherited paradoxes, tensions, and tragedies of a cross-cultural heritage as they attempt to harmonize within the ephemeral present moment.

Exhibitor Biography

Elina Ansary (M.F.A. '25) is a Brooklyn-based artist born in San Francisco to an Afghan-Finnish father and a Jewish mother. Working in painting and sculpture, her complex lineage informs an interest in history, perception, and the collective unconscious. Her alchemical material investigations and phantasmagorical paintings depict embodied perceptual experiences alongside internalized mythology, dream states, and ancestral memory.