July 15 - September 6, 2024
From Texas Wesleyan University:
“Artist Bio: The Bernice Coulter Templeton Gallery is proud to present “Tangles, Knots and Binds” a mixed media exhibition by Humna Ambreen Raza. Humna is an American-Pakistani artist. Originally born in Jacksonville, Florida, Raza moved at the tender age of six to her parent’s hometown of Karachi, Pakistan where she grew up and lived for a decade. In 2013 she returned to the United States, relocating to Fort Worth, Texas. Her first serious decision to pursue art as a career began when she took her first Painting class as a Tarrant County College student. In 2019 she graduated from Texas Woman’s University with her BFA in Painting/Drawing and in 2022 she received her MFA in Intermedia from The University of Texas at Arlington. Raza is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the human body and suppressed emotions. Her most recent body of work reflects her private thoughts and sensations. Her works explore concealed feelings of trauma, stress, anxiety, and depression through a variety of mediums such as painting, drawing, ceramics, and photography. Raza currently works as an Assistant Professor of Art at Tarrant County College South Campus where she teaches Photography and Design I. Alongside exhibiting her work nationally, Raza stays involved within the art community by serving as Treasurer to the Society of Photographic Education’s South-Central chapter. Additionally, she is an avid music lover and plays the Violin.
Work: In Pakistani culture, a woman’s hair should be long and luxurious, as she is judged by how well she keeps it. At a young age Humna was left to figure these very literal and metaphorical expectations of her body on her own. As a multidisciplinary artist, she strives to untangle the knots in her life just as if she were constantly combing out the tangles in her own hair. In Tangles, Knots, and Binds, she engages in a process to find, embrace, and heal her invisible scars and wounds through image making and self-portraiture. The works express a narrative of her long-withheld feelings of depression and anxiety, but she constructs them to invite viewers to relate to the work in some way. The series uses hair, hands, and her own face as visual metaphors for the secrets and lies that have kept her bound in suffering. Hands have the power to create and destroy. Hair has energy and deep ties that are both symbolic and cultural. The face is one’s identity and revealer of emotions. The paintings stress perfectionism, the drawings and ceramics embody freedom, and the photographs seize the harshest, genuine truth.
This series is the story of a young woman facing the trials and tribulations of the ever-growing world around her. It is the harrowing and honest expression of her emotions towards her home, her race, her culture, her religion, her nationality, her gender, and her family. It is a visual gateway for understanding and relating the painful emotions that we all collectively share, in this reality and the next.”
Closing: September 5, 2024 | 5–8 pm
Texas Wesleyan University - Bernice Coulter Templeton Art Studio + Gallery
1415 E. Vaughn St.
Fort Worth, 76105 Texas
817-531-4444
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