Saif Azzuz

still trying to piece it together (boarding school years)

Saif Azzuz’s still trying to piece it together (boarding school years) is an assemblage of a framed collection of various trinkets collected over the span of nine years, combining layered canvases with hand-drawn and carved patterns of textures and forms resembling Indigenous elements such as fish, native plants, and monkey flowers. The work is suspended and the viewer encounters first the back of the framed painting, gesturing to the unseen labor of the artist’s matrilineal Yurok heritage, a tribe which often employed controlled fire as an effort to bring back ancestral growth and native plants. On the “back” of the painting, its original front, bright colors of yellow, orange, and red represent the element of fire as a conduit of conversation and the resilience of the land. Some of these hues seep through to the “front” of the painting—a material gesture analogous to regrowth. The various technique reflects Azzuz’s graffiti roots and integrates Yurok and Arab influences, fostering a visual dialogue among diverse cultural narratives. Each layer of torn, painted canvas explores themes of intergenerational exchange, gentrification, settler colonialism, and land stewardship, highlighting the intertwinement of environmental and Indigenous rights. His work serves as a timely document of personal and cultural ancestral heritage, with notions of identity, displacement, and cultural perseverance, in order to, in the artist’s words, “question the structures and frameworks we believe to be true.”