ARTIST STATEMENT
Kefta seasoned with Goya, Umm Kulthum playing in the background as my mom speaks Spanish on the phone, colorful tatreez pillows on white couches, calling my uncles “amo” and my aunts “titi,” my grandma on her prayer mat while my grandmi shouts “ay Dios mio!” I couldn’t necessarily identify which components belonged to which culture. Existing at the intersection of three cultures as a Puerto Rican-Palestinian-Midwesterner has left me unable to fully identify with any one culture. My work explores how living between cultures impacts a person’s development of identity and understanding of belonging. Through my work, I hold onto cultural elements to prevent assimilating into the predominant culture by which I am surrounded. By combining cultural artifacts, motifs, architecture, and language, I attempt to better understand how each of my cultures has affected the person that I am today. The process of researching, imitating, and incorporating relevant objects, traditions, and patterns helps me connect to my Puerto Rican and Palestinian cultures to which I have desperately sought to belong.
My work is a celebration of my cultures and a reflection on the bits of them that have been embedded into me. Whether we embrace it or push it away, cultural ancestry and history infiltrate who we are in unexpected ways. Like many other multi-cultural people, I exist within a new, blended culture. Through my work, I visually represent this new culture while trying to understand what I can claim as mine, and what happens when such different cultures intersect.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Karina Yanes was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. Her work considers the impact that growing up in a Puerto Rican-Palestinian household in Ohio had on her understanding of identity and belonging. She received her undergraduate degree in Studio Art from Denison University and is currently a graduate student in Ceramics at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Karina has participated in the Open Studio Residency at Haystack School of Craft and the CIRCA Graduate Residency Exchange.
© Karina Yanes