A painting drawn from a family photograph, Charline Motel explores immigrant arrival, shared nostalgia, and the everyday rituals of travel and belonging.

This 30 × 40 inch oil painting was created in response to a prompt inviting artists to engage with a work from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ permanent collection. I chose Simeon the God Receiver by Kehinde Wiley, drawn to the way Wiley situates contemporary bodies within ornate, historically loaded decorative frameworks.

In this self-portrait, my figure rests on an Armenian carpet, a surface that carries cultural memory, domestic ritual, and lineage. The body appears to melt into the carpet’s patterns, blurring the boundary between figure and ground. This dissolution suggests both belonging and erasure, a quiet tension between being held by heritage and being absorbed by it.

The work reflects my ongoing interest in family archives, diaspora, and the ways identity is shaped through inherited spaces and objects. By embedding my own body within the carpet, the painting becomes a meditation on visibility, cultural memory, and the fragile line between selfhood and collective history.

Beneath the Surface: Psychological Portraits in Domestic Space transforms old family photographs into large-scale paintings that explore unease within the familiar. One of the central images is based on a 1970s photograph of my mother sitting alone beside a deserted motel pool. At first glance, the scene feels calm and still, yet beneath that stillness is something exposed and suspended. That tension lies at the heart of the work.

Beneath the Surface: Psychological Portraits in Domestic Space transforms old family photographs into large-scale paintings that explore unease within the familiar. One of the central images is based on a 1970s photograph of my mother sitting alone beside a deserted motel pool. At first glance, the scene feels calm and still, yet beneath that stillness is something exposed and suspended. That tension lies at the heart of the work.