Gagik Aroutiunian

My work embodies an ongoing exploration of the themes of displacement, alienation and personal history, based on my experiences as a foreigner in many countries, including my homeland.  Juxtapositions of diverse materials ( welded steel, water, photographs, battery-powered lights) and the resulting interactions between them function as metaphors of vulnerability, disconnection, and transience.  Involving processes that are as irreversible as time itself, the pieces evoke fading recollection and the instability of memory.  Photographic images (mainly dating from my childhood and representing myself or family members) are excised from their backgrounds and placed in alien environments that will eventually erode them completely.  Surfaces are highly worked and often scarred by the processes by which the works are created.

Borders are another recurring theme in my work.  Evoking barricaded enclosures, maps and topography, many of the pieces express concepts of space under siege and the fragility of boundaries.  Crossing the borders that traditionally delimit the art forms, my work challenges the validity of arbitrarily imposed boundaries, whether cultural or political.

Part fabrication and part assemblage, my work incorporates decontextualized fragments of society’s material culture into structures that offer the viewer opportunities to discover new relationships in the configuration of elements.

Gagik Aroutiunian