Maryam Khaleghiyazdi, an assistant professor of graphic design at UMD, is exhibiting her work at the VisArts gallery in Rockville, Maryland from Oct 1- 16. The digital animation series “Living in Between” includes three works.
Yazdi describes her collection, “Living in Between” as an interactive, multimedia installation with three pieces. “These pieces narrate my life as the result of living between two countries, Iran and the United States,” she says. The pieces are about changing the appearance of American objects. “I have picked these objects from my daily life to show how I see these objects as an immigrant. In the pieces, I am narrating my life as an immigrant to convey the concepts of development, loneliness, and vulnerability.”
One of the pieces, “Morphing Shadow,” is an animation that narrates how Yazdi interacts with her shadow. It’s a collage of a lonely exile’s everyday life, presided over by a crying face. Divided into eight rectangles, it is rendered mainly in pink, brown, and black.
“This symbolizes my old and new thoughts due to living between two cultures. I am working on the concept of living in between because the United States is a diverse community that is willing to accept different people from different cultures, but, since the 2017 immigration executive order, our life has changed a lot. This phenomenon made me reconsider the concept of home and my identity. Since, in the United States, people need to live in harmony with immigrants, they should know about their lives and the challenges they face.”
Another piece, using the colors black and white, incorporates a QR code to offer visitors an individual chronology through 26 labeled steps of life in the United States as an Iranian emigre.
Maryam Khaleghiyazdi's digital animation series “Living in Between.” is at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville, MD 20850. She was featured on September 20, 2022 in a Washington Post Review about her digital animation series “Living in Between.” Washington Post.
See her website: https://maryamkhaleghiyazdi.com
Banner detail and inset photo: Maryam Khaleghiyazdi’s “Morphing Shadow” — an image from her digital animation series “Living in Between.” (VisArts)