Eye of the beholder
By ELAINE D’AURIZIO, STAFF WRITER
NorthJersey.com, NJ
March 13 2005
Think that abandoned factories in Edgewater, oil tanks near the Pulaski
Skyway or factory smokestacks in Paterson are real eyesores? Do you
laugh at the razzing in movies and by comedians about the Garden State?
It’s all, as they say, in the eye of the beholder. To artist Dahlia
Elsayed, they’re beautiful monuments to be memorialized.
“It’s part of our history,” said Elsayed, who lives in Palisades
Park, where she grew up. “For the people of New Jersey, it’s their
landscape.”
Her work has connected with gallery owners and museum curators for the
past 10 years and is on display until the end of April at Manhattan’s
Here Arts Center.
One of her paintings shown as part of “Weird New Jersey: The
Exhibition” is named “Favorite Ruins So Far.” It’s of abandoned radio
towers along the turnpike.
“[The towers] are outdated but dear to your heart,” Elsayed said.
“There are a lot of abandoned sites [in the state]. Everything in
New Jersey has changed so.”
Elsayed is depressed when landmarks are torn down. So she documents
them in pastel acrylic paintings. The abstract but often recognizable
figures – buildings, rivers and highways – are accompanied by words.
Poem-like, they are the artist’s reflections and feelings and create
a dialogue with the viewers.
“I think of them as journalistic paintings,” she said. “They really
tell stories.”
Memories and experiences in New Jersey are relived with the artist.
Thoughts, sounds and smells are stirred.
“People recognize a place and say, ‘I used to live there’ … or
‘My dad worked there,’~_” Elsayed said. “I love it. That’s really
satisfying to me. You want to see your experience on the wall. You
want there to be some kind of connection.”
For the last four years, Elsayed has been on a state grant teaching
in schools all over New Jersey, including Bergen, Passaic and Essex
counties.
“Schools have me come in to share my process with the children and
do creative projects that are based in storytelling and their local
environment,” she said.
The artist – a graduate of Barnard College and the Columbia University
School of the Arts – writes on a manual typewriter before she
paints. Then she puts “layers of washes of paint” on watercolor
paper. “I combine the literary with visual arts,” she said.
When the environment changes as much as it does in New Jersey, there
can be feelings of grief and loss.
Elsayed fondly remembers a Howard Johnson on Route 46 in Ridgefield
that was torn down.
“My dad would take us there for ice cream when you’d win something
or if a friend came over,” she said.
Her Egyptian father and Armenian mother immigrated to the United
States and settled in New York City, where Elsayed was born in 1969.
Growing up in Palisades Park, she strongly connected to her cultural
identity.
Elsayed loved listening to stories her mother, a librarian, and her
father told of earlier days in Armenia and Egypt. Her grandparents
lived with them and they spoke Armenian at home.
“What became the family heirlooms were these places they had lived,”
she said. “Their stories fascinated me.”
Strongly influenced by literature, she kept illustrated journals. She
compares them to the rug work and embroidery her grandmother and
great-grandmother did that was handed down from generation to
generation.
“Even though the materials are different and the work serves a
different purpose, the expression still comes from the same place –
the need to visually record and document your presence in the world
around you … to create a communicable history,” she said.
After 9/11, Elsayed feared a backlash against the heritage so dear
to her.
“As an Arab, you fear that the world is going to think of you one
way,” she said. And although her work had been exhibited before,
she became even more sought out.
“Suddenly I was in demand,” said Elsayed, who has traveled the world.
People wanted to buy her art. So did the government: The U.S.
Department of State bought her works for its “Art in Embassies”
program. She received prestigious grants and residencies from the
New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Edward Albee Foundation, and
ArtsLink. And she was sought out as a teacher, which she does about
nine months out of the year.
The grants and residencies have given Elsayed time to be alone to
create in her studio, which is in a former silk mill in Union City.
When she does, her work often links her two “homelands” – New Jersey
and the Middle East, which she has visited.
For example, one set of paintings is of a White Castle in Union City
and a mosque she saw on a trip to Egypt. Another called, “Jersey
City/Nasser City” are of residences here and near Cairo. The letters
are on sticks, like the “Hollywood” sign in California.
“It’s a capturing of the human experience as a woman, as an immigrant
artist,” she said.
Sensitive to what surrounds her, Elsayed took friends on a boat tour
of the Hackensack River in the Meadowlands. It impressed her and
resulted in a painting of a factory she saw along the shore and a
tiny canoe in the water. It’s called, “On the Turnpike.”
That doesn’t mean Elsayed does not understand ribbing about the Garden
State. She admits the Pulaski Skyway “is black and sooty.”
“But it’s sculptural,” she said. The artist and writer in Elsayed
tries to see the beauty in what surrounds her.
“Radio towers, abandoned factories … I think they’re aesthetically
beautiful,” she said. “When I see it, I’m trying to capture it …
the sounds, the smells, the colors ~E the feelings. It’s my vision
and I’m trying to pass that on.”