Askia Bilal

I use artwork to explore the human experience. I combine drawing, painting, digital mark-making, sewing, and image transfers from select source material that I manipulate in a layered process that is cyclic. My interest in multiplicity and deconstruction drives me to take my own images apart, to reassemble, rearrange, and recycle them to use as a foundation to build new images. This enables me to explore different iterations of the themes I’m interested in, while also reinforcing the cyclic nature of making and the dialogue between and within the works themselves.

My recent work is a series called ‘Non-portraits’. The Non-portrait is a way to make sense of my own lived experiences by exploring a space between figurative and abstract artistic traditions, otherness and the self, the conscious and the unconscious, portraiture and iconoclasm.