Self-Portrait

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.