Iman Issa, Visiting Artist Lecture 2024

Iman Issa gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about her artistic practice which spans drawing, photography, sound, sculpture, writing, text, and installation. Issa begins her lecture by posing the following question: how does one represent a personal relationship to the places, events, and figures around oneself and the places one inhabits? Issa explains that when she first moved to New York, she began utilizing her training in photography, and started photographing New York as a way to make the city become familiar. Issa realized that perhaps what she was recognizing in these spaces was not the presence of a familiar element but rather the absence of a distinguishing detail. It was the very emptiness of these spaces that trended them familiar. Issa then states that another question which is a part of her practice is: how does one bring an image of a space into a moment of definition, and how important titles are to her work. For Issa, titles and their relationship to artwork are also connected to her relationship to language ,which is also very similar to her relationship to form and text. Issa then speaks about the importance for her to think about how one can translate a two dimensional form or an image in one’s mind into a three dimensional form. Issa follows these thoughts she has as precisely as possible in order to see what types of responses are generated. Issa then goes on to state the importance she has on herself to be very precise in finding the exact elements in her work in the way that they appeared. Even if sometimes there is an object that appears in her mind as an artist, it can take a long time for Issa to find that object in real life, and Issa has accepted that. Issa ends her lecture by stating that a lot of the forms she creates in her work deal with meaning, which gives her the courage to avoid excess in her work. Sometimes this refusal to avoid excess can make the work become a part of the conversation of minimalism, which Issa is also very interested in.