THE TAPESTRY IN MY ROOM
The work of Lucie Khahoutian, wavering between collage and photography, illustrates the constant dichotomy of her vision of the world.
The topics she approaches as well as her practice are fed by the binary influence of a childhood in a multicultural household. Orchestrating a discussion between Armenia and France, she feeds an exquisite cadaver narrating her story while resonating with her artistic influences.
She enjoys blending Armenian traditional visual codes with a more European or Occidental environment. Involving both her background and elements of her current life, she weaves a visual tapestry of her surroundings and aim to offer a complete and subtle visual universe in which occident and orient coexist smoothly. Just like a cadavre exquis would assemble bits and pieces from her personality in an anarchic yet truthful flow, collage was an absolute certainty to her. Mixing parts of worlds that are unknown to one another, she tried to make encounters between musical notes, as if she was writing a symphony about where she was from, and where she was going.
The works of Khahoutian approach a wide range of topics while being very focused on religion, spirituality, and mystical matters.
A difficult task, she aims to illustrate – little known – Armenian humor as accurately as possible, hence inviting a playful tone in her images. Far from an over intellectualized work she likes to work around the notion of absurd, inspired by Dada, or later on, Fluxus.
More than ever in a global context of identity confusion and political blur, Khahoutian believes it is essential to celebrate different origins and focus practice on the foundation of different identities, whether there are as human or artist, and on an individual or collective scale. She is proud to illustrate, through her work, the wealth of a cultural migration and bring a little bit of Armenia on an artistic scene that, as she says, seems to have given the cold shoulder to this part of the world for too long now.
Every layer of her collages becomes a period of her life, a person met, a language spoken, a place visited or a mood she was in. This collection of images, is a celebration of the most important part of artists’ identity, being a Caucasian women.